Electric Citizen - Higher Time

Electric Citizen are back again this year with a release to their 2014 follow up Sateen with an album entitled, Higher Time. Released on the RidingEasy Records label, the band are still bringing back real good music to where it belongs. With Doom, Occult, Prog, and Heavy Rock, it shows that the quartet have more up their sleeves and taking it up to a greater volume. The Ohio rockers can kick a huge amount of ass and give Auto-Tunes, the big gigantic middle finger.

Laura and her husband Ross Dolan aren’t doing for the money and showing attention, they along with Randy Proctor and Nate Wagner are doing it for love, support, and the music. Higher Time is the example of working hard and creating an eruptive balls-out hard doom metal roar as if more the beasts have come out to reign more adventure and terror that lie ahead.

Nate and Randy work together very well and it is still growing as Wagner’s drumming grows stronger and stronger. And he can hit those snares like a cannon blast by giving the driving force with a punching sound that is coming out of nowhere. And the five highlights on the second album, proves they can come at you with a blaring sound.

Ghost of Me reminisces Black Sabbath’s Children of the Grave rhythm with Andrew Highley’s heavier organ sound. The song deals with the reflection of another self as it is telling us of what you are doing and who can you trust as the music has a rumbling rhythm section and head-banging to the core while Crux has a catchy heavy riffs and cranking it up with the 4/4 bars!

Here, Electric Citizen channel both the styles of a sinister grooves between Rush’s Fly By Night-era and Premiata Forneria Marconi’s E’ Festa as if they blended well to combine a Progressive Doom Metal technique and believe me, it’s very interesting and knowing how they can take the Prog genre up a notch. Ross channels the styles and essences of Jimmy Page with a Bluesy Rock twist as the song, Two Hearted Woman deals with messing with someone’s life and creating a catastrophe.

Laura herself is a powerful singer and she hit those arrangements in the style of early Ozzy Osbourne’s Sabbath-era and Frijid Pink’s Kelly Green. With Devils in the Passing Time, you have the crunching melodies between the Organ and Guitar as the bullet train of the rhythm section takes the listener into unbelievable paths. But it’s the futuristic title track that goes more into the Prog direction with a Proto-Rock atmosphere.

You have a surrealism section of the Theremin done by Chris Surface as he takes the instrument along with the band to a dystopian vibe with a psychedelic twist. The lyrics are something straight out of Rod Serling’s The Twilight Zone as the spoken dialog itself which Laura does, it feels out of the stories of the adult illustrated fantasy magazine, Heavy Metal. It’s one of the darker, experimental, and psych-prog metallic vibrations to get the marijuana vibes going!

I had an amazing blast listening to Higher Time. They have never done me wrong and I highly recommend it if you admire Blood Ceremony, Electric Wizard, Jess and the Ancient Ones, and Purson to name a few. They worked hard and they mean it well to get the job done and seeing where they will go to next. The quartet from Ohio are still going strong and if you like some of the band’s I’ve mentioned, then get the first two Electric Citizen albums, you will never be disappointed. Crank this mo-fo up!