wedish doom rockers Witchcraft are a paradox. They are retro-fetishists and record-collection rockers, a condition that usually leads to a form of hysteric blindness where the attempt to replicate an idol’s work misses everything that made the original music great. In doom metal this has manifested itself in a feedback loop where heaviness has become ever more important and consequently anything else bar heaviness is downplayed or jettisoned. Yet it is this other musical content that gives the heaviness its context, meaning, and even its heaviness. Heaviness on its own is easy. Extreme metal too often enters what Simon Reynolds has termed the “zone of fruitless intensification,” where the element that was a music’s original attraction becomes instead a negative because of it’s endless ramping up. The music becomes like a healthy and attractive body pumped to unhealthy and ludicrous extremes through monomaniacal exercise and steroids; it’s no coincidence that the zone of fruitless intensification is an area of concentrated masculinity, with any signs of femininity being purged.

Which is all a long-winded way of saying that a few years back I was having a lot of fun listening to stoner and doom metal, but as time went by and the music’s horizons narrowed and set, it became a chore. It’s also a long-winded way of saying that, counter-intuitively, it’s Witchcraft’s close reading of the past and obsession with specificity and fidelity that make them sound fresh. They realise that to recreate the past you have to create it wrongly—recreating the bits of the music that are obvious will derail it, you have to capture the margins, the bits that don’t matter, instead. The centre will always look after itself. Their necromancy is powerful. When singer/guitarist Magnus Pelander charmingly declares on “Wooden Cross,” “I cannot wake the living dead, since they are already alive,” he puts a stake directly to the heart of the matter.

Although the high points of this album are not as heady as those of their excellent 2004 self-titled debut—the best track included there, “Her Sisters They Were Weak,” is the finest folk-metal song since Fairport Convention’s “Tam Lin” in 1969—overall the album is stronger. Crisper, open production and a wider sound palette allows the playing to shine through and, unlike too many albums from this scene, the bass and drums are clearly audible.

The album opens with a loping, syncopated beat, music that really moves and is capable of getting the coven onto the floor at any post-black mass disco party. Even when they do get sludgy and into treacle tempos, the rhythm section always keeps the beats rolling; it’s like the 1970 footage of Black Sabbath in Paris where even at their slowest, the whole band is always working, keeping things moving with almost imperceptible sounds that you don’t notice until you see the work that goes into making them. From there on in, the album keeps its forward momentum, always fleet of foot but always sure of itself. Sure there are missteps: The guitar trills are occasionally too reminiscent of one of Sabbath’s trademark sounds, and the lyrics can be second-language clunky—“If Wishes Were Horses” rhymes “rules” and “fools” in the first two lines—but these are small matters. Clunkiness is a small price to pay when Pelander and the group-mind as a whole are capable of suggesting emotional subtlety and ambiguousness instead of the twin poles of much current metal, either absolute abjection or absolute power.