Cirith Ungol – Live At The Roxy – Album Review

Cirith Ungol aren’t back—they never left, they just sank into the tar and waited. January 2024, they crawl out of the pit and stomp into the Roxy like something feral that’s been starving in a cave for three decades, and the place erupts. Not with grace. Not with ceremony. Just sound. Ugly, glorious, bone-melting sound.

The Roxy’s a shoebox full of ghosts and spilled beer. Sound bounces around like a pissed-off wasp. You don’t hear music there, you survive it. And Cirith Ungol? They don’t clean it up. They lean hard into the grime, letting those low-end frequencies shake something loose in your guts. Felt like my spine was trying to crawl out the back of my hoodie.

Tim Baker’s voice is  a busted chainsaw stuck halfway through a ribcage. On “Nightmare,” he sounds as if he’s yelling from the bottom of a mine shaft—or maybe from inside his own coffin. It’s cracked, hostile, frayed at the edges, but alive. You don’t get that tone from singing lessons. You get it from surviving something that should’ve killed you.

The riffs are still pure doom delirium. “Join the Legion” limps and stumbles, never quite landing where it should, like a drunk god trying to start a war. “Frost and Fire” The riff grabs you by the teeth and pulls. “Atom Smasher” is just a crawlspace full of sub-bass and tension. Makes you feel like your fillings are plotting to escape.

Rob Garven’s drum kit sounds like it personally offended him. His paradiddles during “Black Machine” maintain this manic precision, yet he’s supposedly tearing up behind his kit. The man’s either secretly a robot or experiencing a religious experience—possibly both. His snare cracks like rifle shots across the venue’s back wall.

Cirith Ungol played this same venue in ‘83 with the rest of the Metal Massacre weirdos. Most of those bands are either long dead, buried or maybe got a reissue or two. Yet Cirith Ungol are still kicking the floorboards in, still spitting blood on the curtains. Outlasted everyone like a cockroach with a flying V.

Live albums usually suck. Either they’re overdubbed to death or recorded with a toaster. But Live at the Roxy feels like you’re duct-taped to a speaker in the front row. It creaks, it howls, you can hear someone drop a bottle in the middle of a solo. It’s chaotic. It’s barely contained. But it works. Not in spite of the mess—because of it.

People always name-check The Who Live at Leeds or Deep Purple Made in Japan, like museum pieces. They sound like bands trying to prove something. Cirith Ungol have no longer got anything  left to prove. They’re playing like the building’s on fire and they’re the ones who lit it. This thing reeks of desperation, stubbornness, and raw nerve. You can feel the years grinding off their bones.

There’s talk of a new record. Whatever. If it happens, great. If not? This is one hell of a last gasp. Just don’t play it through nice speakers. This album wants to bleed. It wants to break things. Play it loud enough and it’ll redecorate your walls in tinnitus.
Score 7/10
Track List

1. 1.    Velocity (S.E.P.)
   2.    Relentless
   3.    Sailor on the Seas of Fate
   4.    Sacrifice
   5.    Looking Glass
   6.    Dark Parade
   7.    Distant Shadows
   8.    Down Below
   9.    Atom Smasher
   10.    I’m Alive
   11.    Frost and Fire
   12.    Black Machine
   13.    Blood and Iron
   14.    Chaos Descends
   15.    The Frost Monstreme
   16.    Fire
   17.    Death of the Sun
   18.    Master of the Pit
   19.    King of the Dead
   20.    Join the Legion
       Label – Metal Blade
       Release – 25th April

       For all things Cirith Ungol click HERE and to purchasee the album, click HERE