• Getting re-acquainted: Blue Öyster Cult – (Don’t Fear) The Reaper (1976)

    A coiling guitar figure wraps itself around your consciousness, drawing tighter and tighter. And then… and then… the cowbell comes in. This, my friends, is as good as it can ever get. Blue Öyster Cult had been a rather gnarly biker-rock band, all greasy hair, leather trousers, and weird, occult imagery. They even had their own runic symbol, man. Their first three albums are packed with post-Altamont death jams, best summed up by the fantastic ‘Career of Evil’ from their third album, Secret Treaties, a song that begins with the lines, “I plot your rubric scarab, I steal your satellite, I…