Review Summary: "Uhh..We sort-of went off in a tangent there"
April the 20th is famous (or infamous, depending on to whom you ask) as the day when weed lovers celebrate their favorite drug and its wonderful effects. There couldn’t have been a more appropriate day for All Them Witches to have released their narcotic fueled sprawling mess of an EP,
A Sweet Release. With long, immersive, instrumental jams abundant with interesting textures and hypnotic melodies, All Them Witches bring an album that is every bit as weed-fueled as the release date would have you expect, making for yet another sweet release in their discography. The first thing of note when it comes to this EP is its length. At 57 minutes, it is longer than anything else they have released, and this includes the two LP’s that have been released:
Lightning At The Door and
Our Mother Electricity. This is largely as a result of the kind of music being played here: slow, hallucinatory, noodling jams that flip and flop all over the damn place. While this may be a turn-off for many due to sheer runtimes, the sporadic nature of the album(songs range from 2 minutes to 24), and the all-out trippy vibes this produces will prove this album more than worthy of lighting one up to.
The first track "It Moved We Moved : Almost There : A Spider's Gift", the 24 minute track I mentioned earlier, is actually three songs played in succession together into a messy, murky whole that clearly was intended not to be listened to while sober. If anything in the album signifies "drug-fueled space-jam"(no pun intended), this would be it. Weird noises echo back and forth as the song trods onward without any clear path in sight in "It Moved We Moved". 8 minutes in the band stops playing and the frontman says "Uh, we kind of went off into a tangent there", but then escapes back into his own psyche along with the rest of the band, letting their stream of consciousness dictate what would be played for "Almost There", a track that starts with a repeated sample of the frontman saying "We're almost there...We're most definitely gonna be out of tune for the rest of the night" before we enter another dark cave of repeating feedback, eerie moments of guitar feedback, and trance inducing instrumentation. This one in particular being the aptly titled "Almost There", this one is much heavier, with actual riffs, but still keeps its sporadic tendencies. It just keeps pulling listeners deeper and deeper into its obscure fog. The behemoth of a first track finally ends with the rhythmic "A Spider's Gift", which pumps some energy into a seemingly interminable song and layers of feedback pile one-another, building up to a grand finale.
The rest of the album is very much like that first song. A package of sporadic psychedelic jams with no clear destination in sight. That's also what makes
A Sweet Release so appealing, it was released on the day of stoners, for stoners. And even for those with no intention of getting high, this album is like a long road trip, while you're waiting for hours upon hours to get to Vegas, you start to notice the cool places you're going through and the neat little details that surround you on your lonely little journey, like a gigantic ball of twine, or a funny looking rock, or some abandoned buildings that make you wonder what they might've looked like in their heyday. However if you spend all your time just anxiously waiting for when you get your chance to lose all your money to some broken slot machine only to cry about it after getting drunk at some bar full of shady characters, your trip might not be quite as worth it. This album is a lot like that, it's more about the journey than the destination, about the little details than the big climax, because if you're just waiting for some cool moment to pop up, you will end up enjoying this album a lot less.
