The Miserable Witch is a 1983 novel written by Patricia Polacco. The book follows the story of a young girl named Ruthie who lives with her grandmother, who happens to be a witch. However, Ruthie's grandmother is not your typical, whimsical witch. She is miserable and constantly grumpy, making Ruthie's life quite difficult. The main idea of the book is the importance of empathy and understanding. Throughout the story, Ruthie learns to see things from her grandmother's perspective and tries to make her happy.
The most important part is that the riffwriting is seriously awesome – not only are those different styles blended together seamlessly, there’s just something about the riffage on here that effortlessly straddles the line between convincingly occult and insistently memorable. You can remember most of the riffs off this album after a couple of listens, and there’s always something that catches the ear after each listen. Of particular note is that Jones’s lead guitar work is somehow both prominent and extremely tasteful throughout the album – there’s a sense of real care and thought that was put into the note selection on the leads, not to mention there’s this sort of quality where they ooze over the rhythm parts that’s really neat and helps to further the atmospheric qualities the album possesses.
Like most bands of their era, PA uses verse chorus song structuring, but their rendition of it couldn t feel less sterile if they d go out of their way to try. Like most bands of their era, PA uses verse chorus song structuring, but their rendition of it couldn t feel less sterile if they d go out of their way to try.
Throughout the story, Ruthie learns to see things from her grandmother's perspective and tries to make her happy. She goes on various adventures and tries different approaches to cheer her grandmother up, including finding her a pet and baking her favorite treats. The book ultimately teaches readers about the power of kindness and how it can transform relationships.
Judgement of the Dead
Formed in UK in 1978, this traditional doom metal / NWOBHM act is truly a cult band in every sense of the word. It took them more than a decade to record their debut album Judgement of the Dead (1982). It was certainly worth to wait. This music takes the listener on a journey through British pre-christian Pagan traditions. You become a part of a UK folk-horror classic like “The Wicker Man” or “Blood on Satan's Claw” when you listen to this. Trevor Portch plays the bass. Drums are handled by John Mizrahi. Alan Jones is responsible for the music and the perfectly crafted guitar while his style of playing can be considered on the level of the best masters of classic hard-rock and heavy-metal and is often sadly overlooked by the general rock audience, for whom the bands themes seem too weird and obscure. The guitar is really what makes them sound outstanding. Terry Jones wrote the occult and pagan themed lyrics and was the vocalist. He passed away in 2015. His vocals are not going to be for everyone, the nasal singing can turn some modern listeners away, yet it perfectly carries across the themes of the lyrics and gives the music the needed flavor.
The title track “Pagan Altar” which opens the album is a great way to start. It meets the listener with eerie atmospheric chanting and invocation to the goetic demon Samael. And after that the audience is treated with a classic NWOBHM / Doom Metal hybrid greatness. The riff changes between trance-like meditative doom and the hard’n’heavy dynamic hooks. “In The Wake Of Armadeus” continues the album with a catchy tune which only picks up the tempo as it goes while keeping the doom-layed sabbath structure. The solo on it is amazing. “Judgement Of The Dead” — may be the best one here. A Celtic folk dirge opens with some gloomy synth before treating us to the dark guitar work. The lyrics reek of medieval dark tales: (Galleries of dead are smiling / Candlelight is shining / Judgement of the dead / Hooded corpses form the jury / Point with pent up fury / Judgement of the dead.) It is about the dead judging the living and ties in political modern themes, that were common after “summer of love” began to fade. Yet the narrative is much more subtle than in Sabbath's classic Warpigs. The song feels like a old-fashioned ghost story while touching on modern issues. That is what good lyrics are supposed to be.
“The Black Mass” – another occult dirge, this time less pagan and more outright satanic. The slow heaviness gives an impressive theatrical feel. It is like a soundtrack to a play about black magic. Terry sings: (Through the corridors of darkness / On the wings of man's desire / Conjured by the soulless ones / At the everlasting fire / Borne on waves of insanity / From man’s primeval past / The mantra of the tumult / Has awakened him at last).
The lyrics deal with the coming of a new age like in Kenneth Anger's occult film “Lucifer Rising” which is based on the works of Alister Crowley, it declares the end of the Christian Era. (Oh, this is the age, the age of Satan / Oh, now that the twilight is done / Oh, now that Satan has come.) Such lyrics were not a mere cliché when the song was composed but rather it was a new approach to dark romanticism in rock and early metal.
Night Rider is a mystical NWOBHM song which continues the mythological references which were established in the first part of the album. The second part of the song brings in more classic doom metal.
“Acoustics” - a pure folk tune sounds more happy than the rest of the album. It adds to the folk and pagan feel.
Reincarnation touches on the subject of the myth of creation and the cyclical nature of life on earth and is in line with the heathen world view. The track is more mellow 70s rock yet it still packs a powerful doom melody. A good way to end the journey.
Pagan Altar were ahead of their time. The lyrics and themes they touched upon make them related to British dark-folk and the pagan / folk black metal. Both scenes came much later. The journey lies through the ghostly moors of the Celtic lands, through the ruins of ancient cities and dark forgotten grave mounds. This is a key album for the early development of doom metal. It displays the move from hippies’ optimistic “flower-power” to darker pessimistic occult ritualistic themes. This movement was started by bands like Pentagram, Black Sabbath, Witchfinder General and even earlier by Coven. All of these bands have one theme in common: the use of dark magic in the lyrical themes, although they do it in different ways. Pagan Altar's debut displays one of the finer examples of this dark art. Many doom bands have referenced this band as an influence. Reverend Bizarre, Lord Vicar, Dawn Of Winter, Blood Ceremony – just to name a few. The modern listener needs to understand the context of the decades when the band recorded this, it will make the impact of the album greater and its significance more apparent.
Originally written for Iratus Vox Zine
A sending from beyond the stars - 90%
Abominatrix, August 9th, 2006On a misty night in autumn, deep within the shadowy corners of an ancient cemetery where the bones, hopes and sorrows of thousands of human lives are interred, an emissary from the final descendents of mankind reaches across the vastnesses of space, time and the barriers of the mind in order to communicate to some of our contemporaries, the First Men, the total history of human and planetary evolution over the thousands of millions of years between our time and his own "transcendent epoch". To minds narrow and feeble such as our own, the ways of our most distant progeny seem alien, aloof and incomprehensible, yet they possess the full scope and knowledge of all human endeavour, strife and tragedy. They have watched the planets bloom and thrive, then fall to calamity, misuse or divine accident. They are the very last spawn of humankind, baring only the tiniest germ of resemblence to our own race, and they have the answers that for aeons man thought waited in the light that was to come after the death of each individual, at least if he were pious and followed the appropriate ecclesiastical teachings of the moment. The truth may disturb the soul, for it reveals the beauty in things spurned for centuries .. the majesty of the King of the Dead, the great spires of pandaemonium casting their stars to earth where each meteoric landfall germinates to life: hungry, needful, lusting and beautiful. Nevertheless, it is a truth that some of us must here and a wisdom which the dwellers at the end of time will impart to those with the tenacity to hear it. Before long, you find yourself in supplication before the great stone slab whose face is carved with glyphs so ancient you feel instinctually that they must have originated in some other cycle, a cycle which could just as well be transcendent of time altogether. As the mist thickens, a rolling cascade of thunderous sound begins, a sound which cannot originate from earthly stormclouds yet which heralds the arrival of a tempest that will either leave you standing proud and majestic, a giant among men, or crumple your very being, reducing you to a gibbering parody of the man you once were.
The time of this particular channeling is irrelevant; but nevertheless its results were released to a very small group of enlightened souls in the year 1982. At the time, the new wave of British heavy metal, a nebulous movement with little to draw together its practitioners in the way of sound or aesthetic (although nowadays many misconstrue the prototype as being full of guitar harmonies and galopping bass lines . wonder why. ) was in full swing, and it is difficult for someone looking at this period in retrospect to know how to separate the wheat from the chaff. SO many bands, most barely even bringing a flicker of recognition today. So many obscure 7 inch records and odd juxtapositions of satanic reparté and sugarry rock n roll anthems. Recently the name Pagan Altar has been increasingly heard in the true metal underground, though its name seldom spoken above a whisper so as only to attract individuals of a certain mindset, the mindset necessary to receive this gift. Surely the disparate and indefinable NWOBHM "movement" never produced anything that was remotely like this album. The punchy yet thoughtfully articulated swagger of Legend, the underlying seething darkness behind the Desolation angels and the horrific abrasiveness of contemporaries Death SS south and away over the mediterranean might have come close at times, but this entity is as unique as any of metal's greatest achievements, in aesthetic if not in sound.
In some respects, the nature of this beast is revealed in the fact that it does sound like nothing else recorded at this time. Doomier than anything on Trouble's yet-to-be-recorded debut album, more relentless in its insistent plod than early Saint Vitus and possibly more genuinely celebratory of the occultic forces it seeks to uphold than Mercyful Fate, this really speaks of a group of four lads who came into communion with something distant and grandiose and vast. Imagine the most unearthly and magical moments of the first Black Sabbath album, stripped of most of their overt blues connotations and armed with a strange, alienating and low fidelity sound as well as a vocalist with an even more bizarre timbre than Ozzy's own and you will have an idea of what this feels and sounds like. If you ever got the chills running over your spine when listening to the eponimous Black Sabbath track and wanted to revel in the feeling, you are in for a real shock.
"Burning life’s eternal fire,
Dictated by desire,
A Pagan Altar high,
From beyond the stars."
Yet here, in these six pieces telling of black celebrations, of the judgement delivered unto the leaders of man (who got The Story completely and utterly wrong), of the death and rebirth of planets . there is no warning, no mad ululation to an idiot god who laughs in the face of his imploring subjects. No, no, this is a sardonic bacchanal, without a trace of the self-concious attitude that plagues many who sing about occult subjects. Here we have lyrics that would make any self-styled serious black magician proud, writings that touch off a flame of passion and rebellion that most modern-day black metal bands wouldn't have the fortitude to aspire toward.
Like the marching inexorable gait of cloven-footed legions, the music ploughs forward delivering its messages of redemption by force and will. The guitar weaves the fabric of the portal with methodical and stately creepiness, injecting just the right amount of cathartically simple but effective mostly minor pentatonic solos and drawn-out and lingering riffs that carry with them the reek of the sepulchre. The percussion clatters and crashes rhythmically, the album's distinct lack of production values coupled with the positively lacadaisical yet very heavy assault on the kit helping to maintain the illusion that this transmission is being filtered to you, the listener, through the walls of a particularly crowded mausoleum. Over it all, Terry Jones wails stridently but distantly, as though a tenebrous apparition carried on the wind, its noisome fibers scraping against inner ear and cranium. His voice is a nasal one, not particularly strong but strangely ghostly and compelling:
"Circles of witches chanting his name,
Calling the damned one to rise once again.
The blood of the sacrifice darkens the floor,
The gateway is open they’ve unlocked the door.
Legions of witches meeting on Candlemas eve,
The Dark Age has ended surrendering down on its knees."
"The Wake of Armadeus" and "Night Rider" are two somewhat more uptempo numbers, the former being a hair-raisingly evil sounding affair and the latter featuring some unbelievably colossal riffing that only the most quintessential doom bands (I'm thinking mostly of Trouble and Black Sabbath here) could create. "Judgement of the Dead" is a sprawling epic with chilling guitar leads, macabre lyrics and a very creepy and memorable introduction played in dirgeful fashion on bass and organ. Then there is the final statement, "Reincarnations", preceded by a prelude simply called "Acoustics" in which guitarist Alan Jones foregoes his usual abrasive razor distortion for some classically inspired picking (nice, full bodied acoustic sound, too) which launches into the track proper, beginning with a beautiful section of lyrics sung over thoughtful and expansive bass lines and stately acoustic guitar backed by a softly strumming electric. The holocaust has expended its brutal power, and only ashes remain. yet within the ashes dwell the seeds of life, dormant for aeons, until .
"Just like before in the distant past,
The hand of the sculptor begins to cast.
Shapes of lands, islands and seas,
Mountains and valleys, flowers and Trees.
Dawn!, surging light, brightening up those darkened hills,
Bringing life, to the charred remains,
A long dead Sun now alive again.
A long dead Sun, now alive again."
Proud and triumphant, the band throws itself into its final stride, and you can almost feel the passing of the ages as the race, different yet in so many ways the same as that which came before it, strives onward again, reaching toward those distantly glimmering stars and unknown, incalculable vistas.
Thus the wheel turns full circle again in its slow and age-grinding progress. Once more the fires of Hell feed mankind, or his next of kin, with the tormenting flames of eternal desire, setting him on his million year quest toward grand acquisition, betterment and ultimate destruction. There lies the only answer, the truth, painful as it eats at the soul of the sapient man, revealed to these sages by those cold, infinitely detached minds. Whether you find in it beauty and solace, or desperation and futility, you owe it to yourself to hear this and to sink into its unremitting atmosphere. Perhaps the experience will change you for the better. This is a fascinating record that is not likely to ever be forgotten, at least not by this listener.
A NWOBHM gem unearthed. - 94%
Vic, August 9th, 2002A testament to the musical wealth of the NWOBHM era is the amazing number of bands from that era that were 'lost' and only recently rediscovered and reissued (either with or without help of certain whores. oops, I mean bands covering their songs). London's Pagan Altar are one of the newest rediscoveries, and their first album, Volume I, originally from 1982, is yet another slab of metal that was crimially buried and forgotten. But fortunately no more.
If I were to just say they are Sabbathy heavy metal I might give the impression that they are just another proto-stoner band like Witchfinder General, but that's not quite right at all. Imagine a band heavily influenced by the riff-stylings, songwriting/arrangement, and magical/occult imagery of Sabbath, but completely without all of the psychedelic and drug influence. They don't tune down, so the doomy rumbling sound isn't there, and the songs don't go for heaviness so much as. 'otherworld-liness', maybe? From what I gathered from the band's website this album is thematic and is focused on occult themes, and the music manages to grab that atmosphere of unreality and the terror a person feels when faced with something forbidden (I guess I'm thinking of Hawthorne's short story "Young Goodman Brown" where the good puritan guy goes into the woods and finds his whole town in an occult orgy. ).
The music on this album seems timeless, in a way. The music is very faithful to the OLD style of heavy metal like early Sabbath and Priest, both in the riffs/arrangements and the way the bass and drums play off the guitar work. The vocals also seem very 'vintage' - frontman Terry Jones is definitely NOT a 'metal' singer, with his very high, thin vocals that actually call to mind OLD occult/rock acts like Black Widow or early Pentagram - he sounds much more 'rock' than metal in his timbre, but the vocal melodies he weaves into the songs just fit perfectly. The production helps reinforce that 'timeless' sound (though I doubt it was deliberate - this was 1982, after all. ) - it's a bit brittle, like slightly overdriven analog recording equipment, with gritty but slightly thin guitars, a big, fat bass sound, and clean-but-dry drums like on the first couple of Priest albums. You could have told me this came out in 1972 and I'd believe it.
Bottom line, though, is that this album is amazing. Highly recommended for NWOBHM fans or people into old original heavy metal like early Sabbath and Priest. Word is that Oracle Records is currently working on remastering and releasing Pagan Altar's other four albums on CD as well, so keep your eyes peeled.
(Originally published at LARM (c) 2001)
Like the marching inexorable gait of cloven-footed legions, the music ploughs forward delivering its messages of redemption by force and will. The guitar weaves the fabric of the portal with methodical and stately creepiness, injecting just the right amount of cathartically simple but effective mostly minor pentatonic solos and drawn-out and lingering riffs that carry with them the reek of the sepulchre. The percussion clatters and crashes rhythmically, the album's distinct lack of production values coupled with the positively lacadaisical yet very heavy assault on the kit helping to maintain the illusion that this transmission is being filtered to you, the listener, through the walls of a particularly crowded mausoleum. Over it all, Terry Jones wails stridently but distantly, as though a tenebrous apparition carried on the wind, its noisome fibers scraping against inner ear and cranium. His voice is a nasal one, not particularly strong but strangely ghostly and compelling:
It reminds us that everyone has their struggles and that a little empathy can go a long way in brightening someone's day. Patricia Polacco's storytelling and vivid illustrations bring The Miserable Witch to life, making it a heartwarming and memorable read for children and adults alike..
Reviews for "The Cinematic Influences on The Miserable Witch 1983"
1. Lucy - 2/5 Stars
"The Miserable Witch from 1983 was a disappointment to say the least. The storyline was slow and lacked any real excitement or suspense. The characters were underdeveloped and I found it difficult to connect with any of them. The special effects were cheesy and outdated, making it difficult to immerse myself in the story. Overall, I found the movie to be dull and unremarkable."
2. Max - 1/5 Stars
"I regret wasting my time watching The Miserable Witch from 1983. The plot was confusing and disjointed, leaving me feeling frustrated and disinterested. The acting was subpar, with many of the characters delivering their lines in a forced and unnatural manner. The pacing was off, dragging on in some scenes and rushing through important moments in others. I would not recommend this film to anyone looking for an enjoyable and engaging experience."
3. Sarah - 2/5 Stars
"The Miserable Witch from 1983 had potential, but it was squandered by poor execution. The script felt overly melodramatic and the dialogue was often cringe-worthy. The cinematography was lackluster, with unappealing visuals that failed to capture the essence of the story. Additionally, the movie relied heavily on clichés and predictable plot twists, leaving little room for originality. Overall, I was disappointed with this film and would advise others to choose something else to watch."
4. Jack - 2/5 Stars
"The Miserable Witch from 1983 was a forgettable film that failed to leave a lasting impression. The storyline was predictable and offered no surprises. The acting was mediocre, with unconvincing performances from the main cast. The movie also suffered from pacing issues, with slow and uneventful moments that made it difficult to stay engaged. Overall, I found this film to be a lackluster and forgettable experience."