14 April 2022

White Zombie: La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1 (1992)

White Zombie:
La Sexorcisto: Devil Music, Vol. 1 (1992)

La Sexorcisto
was the predominant soundtrack to my time in art school, pulsing daily from a stereo cassette deck at the back of the room, which happened to be where I was situated.

Being inspired by the likes of Van Gogh, Hieronymus Bosch, and White Zombie was an exhilarating feeling that I hope will remain indelible in my memory for as long as I'm alive, for those same years were some of the most important of my life, thus far.

Musically the album's dominated by psychedelic, sludgy, almost stoner groove riffs that are undeniably catchy, conjuring images of midnight gatherings at a Hallowe'en carnival, presided over by vocalist Rob Zombie, a kind of rollercoaster preacher peddling bedevilled dreams to an audience hungry for stimulus.

The aesthetic is helped along by a plethora of audio samples that capture the feeling of living inside a Horror B-Movie, which I imagine was the idea. Without them the album would be lessened. And if the overall experience didn't fall into sameness in the last third, it'd be perfect.

I don't think that Rob Zombie will ever top it musically or conceptually. But even if he could, I'm confident that I'd prefer La Sexorcisto still, because of its relationship to those halcyon days and the people I shared them with - some of whom have left the living world behind.

Sometimes it's the combination of time and place that make an album seem more than the sum of its parts. For me, time, place, and album are inseparable, immutable, and unequivocally golden.

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