All Them Witches

ATW New west

Nashville psych-rock adventurists strip back for fifth album.

Since 2012, All Them Witches have been doing weird, wonderful and whacked out things with rock’n’roll. Armed with a stockpile of Blue Cheer, Led Zeppelin and their own ideas, they turned it into a colossal psychedelic creature, peaking on 2017’s gloriously ambitious Sleeping Through The War.

For reasons known only to them, they’ve scaled back on all that for this self-produced record. And it’s difficult not to feel a little disappointed. ATW is their “most intimate, humansounding album” yet, which is all well and good, but it was their otherworldly, not-quite-human panache that made them so exciting before. The visceral drive of Sleeping rarely appears; instead we get slow blues and woozy jams in Harvest Feast, and cool-but-not-killer psych tones in the likes of Workhouse.

It’s still an enjoyable record, with commandingly heady atmosphere aplenty; ideal for late-night spins with deep conversations and/or mountains of marijuana. What’s more, the creeping, hooky menace of Diamond suggests their ear for charismatic hoodoo is still there. But overall ATW seems ‘smaller’ somehow, where previous records were… well, bigger.

If it were anyone else we’d be more impressed, but ATW can do better.