All Them Witches - ATW [2LP Colored]

Stripping things back, Nashville's All Them Witches made ATW, their self-titled 2018 album, a lean, loose-limbed set of psychedelic blues rock pressed here across two colored LPs.

After the sprawling Sleeping Through the War, the band retreated to a secluded cabin outside Nashville and produced this one themselves in just five days, cutting each song a handful of times and keeping the takes that felt most alive. Keyboard player Jonathan Draper added Fender Rhodes and organ, and the whole thing carries the warmth and grit of musicians playing in one room.

"Fishbelly 86 Onions" opens with a heavy, swaggering riff, and "Diamond" rolls along on Charles Michael Parks Jr.'s murmured vocal and a slow-burning groove. "Harvest Feast" is the centrepiece, more than ten minutes of patient build and release, while "HJTC" leans into the band's knack for hypnotic, circling repetition.

Ben McLeod's guitar does a lot of talking, bluesy and fuzzed one minute, spacious and searching the next, while drummer Robby Staebler keeps everything swinging rather than pounding.

Eight songs and more than fifty minutes of music, so the double vinyl gives these long, unhurried jams the room they need. It's a record to play loud, late and all the way through, preferably with the lights low.