Description

By most bands fifth LP, the sound is pretty set. Parameters established. Refinement dissipated in favor of to-formula execution of what s worked in the past. Fair enough. All Them Witches go a harder route. In 2017, the Nashville four-piece offered what might ve otherwise become their own template in their fourth album, Sleeping Through the War. Also their second for New West Records behind 2015 mellow-vibing Dying Surfer Meets His Maker, it brought a larger production value to dug-in heavy psych blues jamming, with oversight from producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson). After exploring new ground through their early work on 2013 s Lightning at the Door and 2012 s Our Mother Electricity as well as Dying Surfer, the band had arrived at something new, sprawling, and grander-feeling than anything before it. So naturally in a year they ve thrown that all to the Appalachian wind, turned the process completely on its head and gone the absolute other way: recording in a cabin in Kingston Springs, about 20 miles outside of Nashville on I-40, with guitarist Ben McLeod at the helm. Take that, expectation. The result, mixed by Rob Schnapf (Beck, Elliott Smith, Kurt Vile), is the most intimate, human-sounding album All Them Witches have ever recorded and another redefinition of who they are as a band. Introducing keyboardist percussionist Jonathan Draper to the fold with McLeod, bassist vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., and drummer graphic artist Robby Staebler, All Them Witches All Them Witche It s the band confirming and continuing to develop their approach, in the shuffle of Fishbelly 86 Onions, the organ-laced groove of Half-Tongue, the tense build of HJTC and the fluid jam in closer Rob s Dream. Its a reaction to being a bigger band. To playing bigger shows, bigger tours, etc. From the sustained consonants in Parks vocals to McLeod s commanding slide in Workhorse and drifting melancholy at the outset