Jason Crews is the owner and editor of INFRARED MAGAZINE and a Dallas–Fort Worth-based music journalist and concert photographer. Through INFRARED MAGAZINE and JASON CREWS PHOTOGRAPHY, he covers rock, metal, country, and live music with a focus on album reviews, artist features, concert coverage, and photography. His work is driven by a genuine passion for music and helping artists connect with new audiences through honest writing, strong visuals, and meaningful storytelling.
Rating: 9 / 10 Stars
BEWITCHER is: Mateo Von Bewitcher (guitar/vocals), Andreas Magus (bass/vocals), Rand Crusher (drums)
REVIEW – There are albums that try to resurrect the sound and spirit of another era, and then there are albums that sound like they never got the message that the era ended in the first place. BEWITCHER’s Under the Witching Cross belongs firmly in the second category.
Released May 10, 2019 through Shadow Kingdom Records, BEWITCHER’s sophomore album took everything dangerous, sleazy, blasphemous, and ridiculously fun about the Portland band’s self-titled debut and sharpened it into something more complete. This is blackened speed metal with its boots planted equally in heavy metal, thrash, punk, and filthy rock ‘n’ roll, but reducing Under the Witching Cross to genre terminology misses what makes the album work. BEWITCHER understand that this kind of music is supposed to feel alive. It should be reckless. It should make you want to turn it up louder than you probably should. Most importantly, it should sound like the people playing it believe every second of it.
Under the Witching Cross does exactly that.
The album was engineered by Night Demon guitarist Armand John Anthony at The Captain’s Quarters in Ventura, California, with Joel Grind once again handling the mix and mastering. The result pushed BEWITCHER toward a darker, more layered production without cleaning away the viciousness that defined the band’s earlier material. That distinction becomes important across these eight songs. The record still sounds dangerous, but there is considerably more happening beneath the surface than nonstop speed for speed’s sake.
Opening track “Savage Lands of Satan” immediately establishes exactly where the listener has arrived. BEWITCHER waste little time inviting you through the gates before the riffs start cutting loose. The song sets up the album’s landscape of scorched earth, damnation, heavy metal excess, and complete surrender to the mythology BEWITCHER have built around themselves. It is theatrical without becoming theatrical metal. The darkness is there, but so is the grin behind it.
That balance is one of BEWITCHER’s greatest weapons.
Plenty of bands can write songs about Satan. Plenty can play fast. Plenty can throw on leather, spikes, inverted crosses, and enough occult imagery to make the point obvious before anyone hears a note. What separates Under the Witching Cross is that the music underneath all of that imagery is good enough to make the gimmick unnecessary. The satanic imagery becomes atmosphere rather than camouflage.
“Hexenkrieg” keeps the attack moving while beginning to expose some of the record’s strongest melodic instincts. The song still charges forward with the urgency expected from BEWITCHER, but this is not a band throwing three chords into a blender and calling it speed metal. Guitar leads cut through the violence, the riffs are designed to stick, and the song begins establishing the balance between chaos and control that makes the album much more replayable than a simple thirty-minute assault.
Then comes the title track.
“Under the Witching Cross” feels like the album’s manifesto. Denim, leather, chains, moonlight, apocalypse, Satan, and heavy metal itself all collide in a song built as much around worship of the genre as worship of anything lurking beneath it. The chorus turns the title into an anthem, and that is where BEWITCHER’s personality becomes impossible to miss. This band understands that evil does not have to be miserable.
There is something almost celebratory about the darkness.
BEWITCHER are not asking anyone to sit in a candlelit room contemplating the abyss. They want you drinking from it.
The title track also reveals how far the band’s songwriting had moved beyond simply trying to play faster than everyone else. Melody has room to breathe. Traditional heavy-metal instincts begin pushing through the grime. The guitars do not merely attack; they lead. What could have been another exercise in retro blackened speed metal starts becoming something with a considerably broader vocabulary.
“Heathen Woman” pushes that rock ‘n’ roll character even further. The occult imagery remains intact—sorcery, ritual, possession, paganism—but musically the song carries the swagger of a band that knows heavy metal existed long before anybody started worrying about precisely which subgenre belonged on the label. There is sleaze in it, groove in it, and enough traditional heavy-metal attitude to remind you that BEWITCHER’s musical ancestry extends far beyond the most obvious black-metal comparisons.
And then “Too Fast for the Flames” hits.
Originally released ahead of the album, this is the song that inspired the earlier INFRARED review, and hearing it within Under the Witching Cross gives it considerably more context. The single already worked as a concentrated dose of BEWITCHER: machine-gun riffing, poisonous vocals, relentless rhythm, and a chorus built around the idea of living so hard that not even Hell can catch you. On the album, however, it becomes something more important.
It is the moment where the entire BEWITCHER philosophy is condensed into less than three minutes.
“Too Fast for the Flames” is not complicated, and it does not need to be.
The riffs fly. The chorus sticks. The song burns through everything in front of it before disappearing almost as quickly as it arrived. There is rock ‘n’ roll underneath the extremity, melody underneath the dirt, and a sense of humor underneath all the damnation. It is heavy metal as dangerous escapism—the musical equivalent of kicking open the door, setting something on fire, and leaving before anyone figures out what happened.
Yet the brilliance of Under the Witching Cross is that BEWITCHER do not spend the remaining album simply attempting to rewrite it.
“In the Sign of the Goat” slows the pulse and gives the record some much-needed weight. At more than five minutes, it is one of the longest tracks on the album, and that extra space allows BEWITCHER to lean harder into traditional heavy metal rather than relying purely on acceleration. The song feels larger and more deliberate, its occult declarations delivered with the confidence of a band discovering that menace sometimes becomes more effective when you stop sprinting.
This is where Under the Witching Cross really separates itself from a one-dimensional speed-metal record.
BEWITCHER can absolutely tear through a song at ridiculous velocity. We already knew that. What makes the album endure is hearing the band recognize when not to.
“Rome Is on Fire” immediately throws the gears forward again, but the lyrical focus takes an interesting historical turn. Nero, Caligula, persecution, cruelty, burning Rome, and imperial madness become fuel for another violent sprint, closing with chants honoring two of history’s most infamous Roman emperors. It is outrageous, theatrical, and perfectly at home on an album where subtlety was clearly never part of the mission statement.
Then BEWITCHER do something even smarter.
They stop singing.
Closing instrumental “Frost Moon Ritual” stretches beyond five minutes and gives the record an ending that feels substantially different from everything leading into it. Instead of trying to win one final race, BEWITCHER allow melody, atmosphere, and traditional metal guitar work to take control. It feels less like another song added to the running order and more like the smoke clearing after everything that preceded it.
That closer matters.
Without “Frost Moon Ritual,” Under the Witching Cross could have ended as an excellent but fairly predictable exercise in blackened speed metal. Instead, the instrumental hints at a band capable of going somewhere much larger. The aggression remains, but BEWITCHER reveal that they understand dynamics, melody, atmosphere, and patience as well.
That makes the album’s eight-song construction particularly effective.
There is no filler here simply to reach an arbitrary album length. At just over half an hour, Under the Witching Cross gets in, does its damage, and gets out. “Savage Lands of Satan” and “Hexenkrieg” establish the attack. “Under the Witching Cross” turns it into an anthem. “Heathen Woman” introduces more swagger. “Too Fast for the Flames” detonates at the midpoint. “In the Sign of the Goat” widens the band’s heavy-metal vocabulary. “Rome Is on Fire” throws everything back into chaos, and “Frost Moon Ritual” closes the door behind it.
That sequencing keeps the album from becoming eight interchangeable variations of the same idea.
And that is exactly where records in this style can fail.
Speed stops feeling fast when absolutely everything is fast. Aggression loses impact when there is nothing around it except more aggression. Evil becomes cartoonish when a band seems desperate to prove how evil it is.
BEWITCHER escape those traps because Under the Witching Cross understands contrast.
The band play fast, but they also know how to stomp. They can sound vicious without sacrificing melody. They can worship at the altar of early extreme metal while allowing classic heavy metal and dirty rock ‘n’ roll into the room. They can write about Satan, witches, goats, apocalypse, Roman emperors, and eternal damnation without ever making the listener feel like they are being assigned homework.
This record is supposed to be fun.
Seven years later, that may be the quality that has aged best.
Under the Witching Cross does not sound important because BEWITCHER were attempting to reinvent heavy metal. They were not. Its strength comes from how completely they understood what made this music exciting in the first place. There is Venom-like filth in the foundation, punk recklessness in the rhythm, thrash in the attack, traditional metal in the lead work, and enough Motörhead-style rock ‘n’ roll spirit running through the entire thing to prevent any of it from becoming sterile genre worship.
BEWITCHER take the past seriously without taking themselves too seriously.
That is a difficult balance to fake.
The album also represents an important step between the rawer attack of BEWITCHER’s 2016 self-titled debut and the increasingly ambitious records that followed. Under the Witching Cross was explicitly presented at release as an expansion of the band’s musical and artistic ambitions, and listening to the record as a complete work makes that progression obvious. The savagery remained intact, but the songwriting, melodic instincts, production, and willingness to stretch beyond nonstop velocity were already pointing toward a band capable of much more than repeating its debut.
That makes “Too Fast for the Flames” a perfect gateway into the album, but it is no longer the entire story.
The real story is what surrounds it.
It is “Savage Lands of Satan” opening the gates. It is “Hexenkrieg” turning witchcraft into warfare. It is an entire room shouting the title of “Under the Witching Cross.” It is the sleazy supernatural swagger of “Heathen Woman.” It is “In the Sign of the Goat” proving BEWITCHER can become heavier by slowing down. It is Rome burning beneath Nero and Caligula. And finally, it is “Frost Moon Ritual” standing over the wreckage without saying a word.
That is Under the Witching Cross.
Fast when it needs to be. Filthy almost all the time. Melodic when you least expect it. Blasphemous with a smile on its face.
BEWITCHER did not make a record that politely borrowed from the glory days of speed metal. They dragged those sounds back into the street, covered them in smoke, leather, sweat, cheap beer, occult symbolism, and gasoline, and dared somebody to light the match.
“Too Fast for the Flames” might have originally provided the spark.
The entire album is the fire.
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