So… what’s the deal with that album title? Forgive me for sounding — and being! — smug here, but what about Pentagram has ever been “Lightning in a Bottle”? Pentagram are, fundamentally, the first all-American Sabbath rip-off. Given, Pentagram were early adopters, releasing singles all throughout the ’70s even if the first full-length only materialized in the mid-’80s. Being early is not always a good thing, however, and Pentagram had a very shallow perspective on the band they were aping. Honestly, to me it always felt like the image and general sound seemed more important to Pentagram than actually imitating the revolutionary songwriting that made the grandfathers of metal such a unique act. Sure, Pentagram had the heavy down-tuned riffs, but none of the uniquely dark, proto-doomy attitude that made Sabbath a hit. Sure, they had a nontraditional off-kilter vocalist in Bobby Liebling, but Bobby has little of the authentically tortured and broken undertones of an Ozzy Osborne. To me, Pentagram had always been a historical footnote and I never got much out of their oeuvre. Can this new album change that?
Frankly, Lightning in a Bottle is more of the same. Pentagram still feel quite underwhelming to me, particularly in how uncommitted their sound is to the darkness of doom metal. A lot of the material could easily fly as a hard rock record, with its plethora of mid-tempo riffs and very few excursions into the aspects of blues harmony that Iommi and friends had darkened so effectively. There’s only two or three cuts of this album that can honestly be considered doom at all, depending on how generous you want to count them. And even then, other acts have run proto-metallic hard rock more authentically and more uniquely. The fundamental question audiences should ask themselves is how high of a pedestal a band like Pentagram needs to be put on to warrant nostalgia goggles strong enough to enjoy this material. And it is not a question of age, either — Sabbath’s final record, 13, is not fantastic either. But it is still leagues ahead of what Pentagram are doing here, and similar bands like the Trouble follow-up The Skull have made good albums as recently as 2018.
So, what is the deal with that album title? Irony? Wishful thinking? Or perhaps an attempt at mythologizing, portraying a band history as something that it was not? At the end of the day, it does not matter. If you want some serviceable doom, Lightning in a Bottle does a decent enough job. But if you want some actually good traditional doom, you’ll have to go elsewhere.
