Ripple Music launches preorders for the exclusive vinyl reissue of WO FAT’s cornerstone 2006 album ‘The Gathering Dark’, making it available in a fully remastered deluxe 2xLP edition for the first time in North America!
Over the course of a sonic odyssey that spans six studio albums, one live recording, two splits, and countless festival appearances across the world, Texas psychedelic doom legends WO FAT have stayed true to the deep, dark blues that wail from within and continually infused their riffs with primal grooves.
Ripple Music’s fully remastered edition of their 2006 classic ‘The Gathering Dark’ presents Wo Fat’s hoodoo vision quest down the dusty back roads of a blues-infused, riff-filled netherworld of psychedelic heaviness. Here is where the band began their ascent up the holy mountainside, armed with the knowledge of long-forgotten grooves and riffs of old. ‘The Gathering Dark’ is relentless swampy voodoo doom that’s packed with acid-drenched solos, crushing riffs and tales of the weird.
While WO FAT work on wrapping up their seventh studio album, Ripple Music will repress the band’s long out-of-print Nasoni Records albums in fully remastered versions coming alongside new liner notes: ‘Psychedelonaut’ (available here), ‘The Gathering Dark’ (preorder here) and ‘Noche Del Chupacabra’ (to be released in 2022).
WO FAT ‘The Gathering Dark’ reissue (fully remastered)
Available from December 10th on Ripple Music
on Limited Edition Splatter 2xLP, CD and digital
– PREORDER
“Wo Fat have cemented their status among stoner metal’s prismatic visionaries.” Metal Hammer
“An immersive experience in which stoner grooves and metal riffs jostle for air in a churning tide of psychedelic juju.” Classic Rock
After over 12 years of slinging their Texas-sized psychedelic blues doom,
WO FAT is going stronger and rocking harder than ever, as they continue their swampadelic vision quest of overdriven, fuzz-laden riffag eand jazz-minded jam explorations, and with six studio albums, a live album, and a couple splits under their belt, Wo Fat has gained a reputation as one of the premier US Stoner Metal bands. Starting with ‘The Gathering Dark’ in 2006, they have stayed true to the deep, dark blues that wails from within and have forged their riffs with a primal grooviness, giving them a consistency of style, even while they have progressed and matured as a band, with their musical forays getting heavier but also trippier at times.
2009’s ‘Psychedelonaut’ really began to solidify the WO FAT name, garnering them wider critical recognition, leading to releases with Nasoni and Totem Cat Records and then on to their two most critically acclaimed releases to date: ‘The Black Code’ (2013) and ‘The Conjuring’ (2014) on Small Stone Records, with ‘The Conjuring’ landing on NPR’s “Top Ten Metal Albums of 2014” among numerous other best-of lists. During these last few years, Wo Fat have made appearances a number of iconic festivals in Europe and the US, Wo Fat teamed up with Ripple Records to release ‘Midnight Cometh’, a slab of riffage that is possibly their most daring psychotropic exploration of heaviness to date.
With voodoo drums beating and molten blues-tempered waves of guitar riffery, they are carrying on the WO FAT tradition of keeping things heavy and fuzzy, but also groovy, which, all too often, is a missing element in much modern heavy music. You can hear the echoes of field hollers and that oft forgotten “way back yonder funk” that fuel the fire that burns deep in the swamp at the witching hour. You can feel the rush of living on the edge and glimpse a phantasmal Coltrane in your peripheral vision as they careen through improvisational jams. And all this with an unrelenting metal heaviness underscoring apocalyptic lyrics that conjure visions of the end of an age, and black midnight bargains and the consequences reaped. While Wo Fat may be speaking a familiar language to the apostles of the riff, there isn’t anyone that sounds quite like them.
