(((O))) Review: Pentagram – High Voltage: Live at Spotsylvania ’78

This rare live recording, previously available only as a bootleg back in I believe it was 2004, captures Pentagram during their brief but formidable time as a five-piece lineup in the High Voltage era. Recorded at an all-night backyard concert in Spotsylvania, Virginia, at bassist Martin Swaney’s mother’s house, the band unleashed a thunderous performance before an estimated 500 fans. What unfolds is Pentagram at full strength, delivering powerful, unapologetic doom metal with a raw intensity that few live recordings have ever managed to preserve.

Released by RidingEasy Records, High Voltage: Live at Spotsylvania (1978) transports listeners back to that unforgettable night. Close your eyes, and it’s easy to imagine yourself standing in Spotsylvania, a historic Virginia county nestled between Washington, D.C., and Richmond along the I-95 corridor.

Better known for its Civil War battlefields and quiet countryside than heavy metal, it became the unlikely setting for one of Pentagram’s most explosive performances. As the amplifiers roared through the night at Swaney’s mother’s backyard, the walls of sound must have echoed across the countryside like rolling thunder, leaving everyone in attendance in complete awe.

Alongside bassist Martin Swaney and vocalist Bobby Liebling, this incarnation of Pentagram featured guitarists Paul Trowbridge and Richard Kueht, with drummer Joe Hasselvander behind the kit. Whatever opinions people may hold about Liebling’s complicated and controversial personal life, there is no denying Pentagram’s place among the true pioneers of doom metal. Their influence stands alongside legendary names such as Black Sabbath, Saint Vitus, Sir Lord Baltimore, Leaf Hound, and Japan’s Flower Travellin’ Band, whose 1971 masterpiece Satori helped lay the groundwork for the genre’s evolution.

This 1978 performance is as heavy, brutal, and uncompromising as anything recorded during the decade. You can practically feel the thunder rolling from Hasselvander’s drum kit as he blends the power of John Bonham, Bill Ward, Keith Moon, and John Densmore into a style entirely his own.

His relentless grooves drive the band through the crushing force of ‘When the Screams Come,’ a performance that feels like the perfect soundtrack to flipping through the pages of Heavy Metal magazine while the night sky fills with smoke and distortion. The revved-up assault of ‘Day of Reckoning’ demands nonstop headbanging. While comparisons to Black Sabbath are inevitable, Pentagram’s attack reaches beyond Birmingham.

There are flashes of Detroit’s raw energy, recalling Iggy Pop & The Stooges, the theatrical menace of Alice Cooper, the fuzz-drenched heaviness of Frijid Pink, and the swirling acid rock of May Blitz and Clear Blue Sky. Trowbridge and Kueht lock together with razor-sharp precision, their twin guitars creating an overwhelming wall of sound that is both ferocious and hypnotic.

That proto-punk attitude continues throughout ‘Review Your Choices’, where Detroit grit collides with crushing doom. The music rises like a monstrous three-headed beast ready to devour everything in its path.

Comparing it solely to Black Sabbath almost feels too easy. Instead, Pentagram carve out their own identity as Trowbridge and Kueht exchange blistering lead work and colossal Iommi-inspired riffs, building wave after wave of crushing heaviness that threatens to engulf everything around it.

The guitar solo leading into ‘Much Too Young to Know’ is simply feral. Echoes of early Led Zeppelin can be heard in the fluid improvisation, with fretboards set ablaze while the crowd urges the band onward.

The performance feels part UFO, part Budgie, combining hard rock swagger with a sludgy, mid-tempo stomp that is equal parts dangerous and exhilarating. It’s the kind of performance that would have made the Bay City Rollers run for cover and shit their pants, nonstop, 24/7!

Naturally, the set closes with ’20 Buck Spin’, a song whose title would later inspire Dave Adelson’s metal label, founded in 2005. It serves as the perfect finale, with Trowbridge and Kueht unleashing everything they have left as the band charges toward one final sonic assault.

The performance feels like the soundtrack to an epic fantasy battlefield, making it easy to imagine the legendary warrior Taarna riding into battle through walls of distortion and towering amplifiers.

If you’ve never experienced Pentagram before, there are few better places to begin than High Voltage: Live at Spotsylvania (1978). It captures a band operating with absolute conviction, long before the wider world fully recognised just how influential they would become. Every riff, every drum fill, and every scream remind you why Pentagram earned their reputation as one of doom metal’s true architects.

This isn’t simply another archival live release rescued from obscurity. It’s a snapshot of heavy music history, preserved at the exact moment when Pentagram were pushing their sound to its rawest and most uncompromising extremes. Decades later, the power of this performance remains undiminished, proving that truly great heavy music never loses its impact.

So, crank the volume until the speakers begin to protest, settle into the chaos, and let this remarkable recording transport you back to one unforgettable summer night in 1978. As David Bowie famously instructed on The Rise and Fall of Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders from Mars, this is an album to be played at maximum volume.