Description

Black vinyl with insert and booklet. Limited 200 copies

Like many bands of the Eighties, Belgium’s Ritual weren’t lacking in talent but found themselves trapped in a bubble of indifference which hampered their chances of ever breaking through. A shame, because, as this album clearly shows, the quartet had a lot to offer and over two demos recorded some sixteen years apart, produced some highly exciting material. The first four songs the band put to tape were recorded in 1984, by a line-up which featured vocalist Alain Vandenberghe, guitarist Didier Retelet, bassist Raymond Roobaert and drummer Eric De Boeck. The band was formed in 1977 when, in Didier’s words, a bunch of friends, heavy metal crazy, decided to form a group. We asked the sound engineer to listen to Vol.4 by Black Sabbath to get a feel for what we wanted,” explains Alain, but he didn’t, I don’t think. And we didn’t have any great experience of studios at that time so we had to make do with what we had. In the band’s early days, Ritual’s influences were ‘everything we listened to, inevitably, suggests Didier, ‘from Black Sabbath to Hawkwind’. The band received very little interest from record companies and decided to press the demo to vinyl themselves. As Didier puts it, After two years of barren prospects, we wanted to leave a trace and decided to press the demo recorded in 1984, although without money, we did not have the opportunity to remix the tape so it was pressed identically thanks to our friend, Nicolas Parent, who wanted it as much as we did. Apart from half a page in ‘Le Soir’ and a few words published in fanzines, we were far from our hoped-for goal. Before we’d recorded that tape, by the way, a song of ours (with a different line-up) ‘Mr. Desnoyer’ had appeared on a local compilation, ‘New Performances For Soundproof Rooms’ which came out in 1983′. Ritual was officially resurrected in early 2000, with Alain and Didier now joined by Eddy De Logi and bassist Jeanf Vranckx. This time around six songs were recorded, all of which have been gathered up here and this collection is rounded off by a live-in-the-rehearsal-room version of March Of The Dead, probably recorded in 1985.

Track list:
1. Paternoster
2. Spaced Out
3. Last Night For Demons
4. Prediction
5. Fucking Bastard
6. Rising Insane
7. Just Want Some Rush
8. Too Late To Change
9. Submission
10. Presence
11. March Of The Dead