Noric Steel

Official reissue of this underground cult classic of early 70's British Progressive Rock.
Tone-setting opener "Blood Runs Deep" alternates between the bludgeoning Neanderthal riffing of Black Sabbath and the horn- and keyboard-sparked refinements of a Genesis or Atomic Rooster; "Mijo and the Laying of the Witch" moves from portentous King Crimson horn lines to a North African Bedouin camp luau before settling into an insistent heavy trudge marked by histrionic vocals à la Sir Lord Baltimore; the title track prefaces its own proto-metallic freakout with a pagan toast featuring wooden blocks and woodland flutes sounding like Jethro Tull at their most eerie, and these qualities are also shared with the pernicious bolero "Black Jewel of the Forest"…

Although it ironically coincided with the compact disc format's slow but inexorable march toward likely extinction, the third millennium's first decade witnessed an incredible boom in CD reissues of obscure ‘70s hard rock bands; bands whose careers quickly floundered or never even took off due to any number of reasons, like the subject of this review, London's Steel Mill. Like many of these commercially failed entities, Steel Mill made the fatal mistake of attempting to partake in the relatively isolated worlds of both progressive and heavy rock, instead of committing to just one or the other, and so their sole LP, 1972's Green Eyed God, fell through the cracks of consumer tastes and wasn't even released in the U.K. until 1975, three years after the group's demise. Be that as it may, few heavy prog bands favored such a dramatic clash between their artier musical pretensions and more visceral instrumental instincts than this London quintet, resulting in fascinatingly schizophrenic numbers boasting as much inner city grime and bluster as they do pastoral purity and whimsy…