All Them Witches - ATW (2018) [Official Digital Download]

By most bands’ fifth LP, the sound is pretty set. Parameters established. Refinement dissipated in favor of formulaic execution of what’s worked in the past. Fair enough. All Them Witches take 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. Their second for New West Records following 2015’s mellow-vibing Dying Surfer Meets His Maker, Sleeping brought larger production value to dug-in heavy psych blues jamming with oversight from producer Dave Cobb (Jason Isbell, Sturgill Simpson).

After exploring new ground on 2013’s Lightning At The Door and 2012’s Our Mother Electricity as well as Dying Surfer, with Sleeping the band had arrived at something new, something sprawling, and grander-feeling than anything before it.

So naturally, in a year’s time they’ve thrown that all to the Appalachian wind, turned the process completely on its head and reversed paths: 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 the band. Introducing keyboardist/percussionist Jonathan Draper to the fold with McLeod, bassist/vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., and drummer/graphic artist Robby Staebler, the new eponymous record isn’t self-titled by mistake. 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.”

It’s 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 of “Harvest Feast,” All Them Witches is there laying claim to the essential facets of their identity. And the urgency of these tracks – fast pushers and sleepy jams alike – is among their greatest strengths.

It’s a rawer delivery, as stage-ready as the band itself, and as ever, it captures All Them Witches in this moment. Is it who they’ll be tomorrow? Who the hell knows? Check back in and we’ll all find out together. That’s the whole idea.

AllMusic Review by James Christopher Monger
2017's Sleeping Through the War saw the Tennessee-based psych-blues outfit drop a largely song-oriented set of cosmic stoner metal emissions that dialed back on some of the more exploratory aspects of their previous outings. With the simply titled ATW, All Them Witches have married both sensibilities, delivering tense, doomy highway burners ("Workhorse"), greasy Southern groove-blues goodies ("Fishbelly 86 Onions"), and brevity-averse "Dazed & Confused"-inspired slow jams ("Harvest Feast"), all of which sound like they were born of an epic 4/20 jam session. Free – for better or for worse – of the stylish, yet tasteful sonic fingerprints of producer Dave Cobb, who helmed Sleeping Through the War, ATW is a homespun affair self-recorded in a cabin just outside of Nashville. Raw and unembellished, it lacks the luster of its predecessor, but it feels truer to the band's retro-leaning D.I.Y. aesthetic. Their predilection toward pairing classic rock architecture with heavy-psych dynamics is made apparent early on, but it really takes hold midway through via the slow-burn single "Diamond" and the over-ten-minute "Harvest Feast," both of which take their time getting to the finish line, but do so with equal amounts of rumination and menace. Zeppelin-isms loom large throughout the relatively spry 52-minute runtime, but Black Sabbath casts a formidable shadow as well, with doomy riffage in great abundance – the early portions of closer "Rob's Dream" echo the sinister atmospherics of "Planet Caravan." All Them Witches certainly don't rush things, but that doesn't make their approach to the genre feel any less immediate. If anything, ATW feels like a product of pure instinct, and while it may take some patience to absorb, there isn't a single note that feels coerced.

Tracklist:
1. Fishbelly 86 Onions (06:02)
2. Workhorse (05:44)
3. 1st vs. 2nd (05:58)
4. Half-Tongue (04:35)
5. Diamond (06:10)
6. Harvest Feast (10:45)
7. HJTC (05:48)
8. Rob's Dream (06:51)


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