Metal Hammer Issue Feb 2013 Bleak Esoteric Tales from the Northern heartlands. Is this BM? Folk metal? Is there any mileage in the fact that the band hail from the same English heartland as doom pioneers My Dying Bride and Paradise Lost? Yet inspiring music is more about talent and intent than genre or style, and OCR are consumate storytellers, with timeless tales of the fecund darkness that lurks beneath the surface of England's green and pleasant land. Arcane traditions of revenance and witches, once kept alive around log fires, can now resonate compellingly through speakers. There are metal precedents here, of course. Cradle of Filth are an obvious comparison, but so are the folkloric films from the golden age of British horror cinema such as 'Blood on Satan's Claw' and 'The Wickerman', or even the ghost stories of M.R. James. Perhaps the unifying factor is something shadowy and unique to the English soul... 'Tis Witching Hour... is wonderfully evocative, eerie and - above all - uniquely English. The Bones of this land are no longer speechless. Gavin Baddely - 9/10 Zero Tolerance Review - Feb 2012 Magazine Issue #51 Having been exposed to the Old Corpse Road sound before it should have come as no surprise to me that their new effort should as before owe a great deal to The Principle of Evil Made Flesh era Cradle of Filth. However, at times this similarity was so potent and overwhelming that I was almost transported back to that glorious time for black metal, 1994. Though keyboards are prominent and the symphonic applies to some passages, Old Corpse Road managed to tip toe around the pit of cheese so often fallen into by bands of this ilk. The Cradle of Filth shock - note vocals (both screeched and spoken), word play, keyboard breaks and the way the vocals mischeviously align to guitar melodies - does not detract from the enjoyment of 'Tis Witching Hour... The kult credibility be damned, Principle... era Cradle were quite something! For a first full length offering, Old Corpse Road have reached a fabulous level of songwriting and many of the 10 tracks that comprise 'Tis Witching Hour... will resonate through your mind long after the disc has ceased spinning. Final track 'As Spectres we Haunt this Kingdom' finishes of procedings with no little solemnity and haunting beauty, leaving us breathless in anticipation of what our English bretheren will conjure next. Geoff Birchenall - 4.5/5 Hellbound.ca Review - May 2013 By Steve Earles Having been involved in the underground for a long time, I’ve encountered so many bad generic bands (ironically, as the music business implodes, and we reach the stage where no new band can hope to make even an existence never mind a living from their music, we find ourselves inundated with a tsunami of truly awful bands), when I first encountered Old Corpse Road, they were a breath of fresh air, I wrote that they had ‘all the strengths of black metal and none of it’s weaknesses’, something that is so evident on their debut full-length album (following a very well-received demo and a split album with British underground legends The Meads of Asphodel). Musically Old Corpse Road draw inspiration from such British legends as Sabbat, Cradle of Filth, and Skyclad, but evermore they display their own unique identity, I feel no one sounds like them and that is as it should be. Old Corpse Road’s music leaps from fierce black metal fury to haunting melodies to razor sharp riffs to haunting folk whimsy. This is a band that love music not just metal, they follow their own unique musical muse. Further, with songs like the title track, ‘The Crier of Claiffe’ and ‘Isobel-Queen of Scottish Witches’, OCR show themselves to have origins beyond the past four decades of heavy metal, they belong strongly to a tradition of storytelling that goes back to the first people to inhabit their land. In this they are to be praised, we live in a world where a person may have 2000 Facebook ‘friends’, and yet not one real person to count as friend (and this is progress? No, it’s a marketing ploy that Lucifer-like has deceived the whole world). We also live in a world where people (I use the term loosely) display a cruelty and contempt to other people via electronic communication that they would never have the courage to do in real life, there are real human beings at the end of the internet but that reality is rapidly being substituted by a pseudo-reality of almost imaginary communication. So OCR’s harkening back to tales being told by person to person is very true and very important. As is OCR’s commitment to a physical tactile product you can actually hold in your hand (the music business has been destroyed by abandoning this century old tradition) is also praiseworthy. Indeed, in a stroke of genius, initial copies of the album actually came with a piece of an actual old corpse road (an old corpse road is a road from a cemetery that has become full to a newer cemetery). The best new British band since The Meads of Asphodel, I can give no higher praise!