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Friday Full-Length: All Them Witches, Live at the Garage

 

Consider All Them Witches in 2014. The band hadn’t been touring for all that long. They had two full-lengths to their name, but what a two full-lengths they were in 2013’s Lightning at the Door (review here) — which was dropped digitally and wouldn’t see physical pressing until the next year — and the prior Our Mother Electricity (review here), which they put out on their own in 2011 only to have it picked up by Elektrohasch Schallplatten the next year, earning the Nashville then-foursome the honor of being the first and to-date only American band to be released by the German imprint. By the time they played the second of the two shows the recordings of which comprise early 2015’s At the Garage, they’d also released the Effervescent EP (review here), which they’d press to vinyl to take on tour, as well as their cover of Albert King‘s “Born Under a Bad Sign” (posted here), a jam called “George Dubya Kush” (posted here) and sundry other downloadable thisses and thats. They were still a relatively new group, though it was clear by 2014 that Lightning at the Door was resonating in a significant way.

At the Garage is comprised mostly of material from that now-essential second album; “Mountain” opens, and apart from “Elk Blood Heart” from the debut appearing in succession with “Marriage of Coyote Woman,” the only other non-LP track is “Born Under a Bad Sign,” which closes the set. Recorded in Winston-Salem, North Carolina, in March and September 2014, it flows as a single performance in no small part because of the flow in the songs themselves — a conscious drift given direction through each member’s contributions, whether it’s Robby Staebler‘s can’t-sit-still-and-don’t-want-to-try drum tension, Ben McLeod‘s classy-in-spite-of-themselves solos, the Fender Rhodes of Allan Van Cleave that was so crucial to the early impressions the band made, or the bass twists and slacker-soul vocals from Charles Michael Parks, Jr. — and captures a sense of spaciousness in a way that live albums can’t always do, the vocal echo seeming to reach out not just through the room but through the speakers as well. Highlights include the duel between McLeod and Van Cleave in “When God Comes Back,” the entirety of “Mountain,” Parks‘ starting “Charles William,” and, well, pretty much the rest of it.

The point of considering All Them Witches in 2014 is they were a band completely on fire. Confident and brash enough to have a firm sense of who they were as players, a couple tours under their collective belt in order to all them witches live at the garagetighten up their performances and allow for some audience interaction — see the stop about halfway into “Charles William” — and an energy to their songs that was youthful even as it carried a heavy blues weight that was invariably older-feeling. Dynamic as players and more progressive than they let on, they were in a special place as a group, being newly locked in and on the cusp of realizing their potential. All Them Witches would prove over time that their trajectory was one of constant change and evolution, each record different and building on the last, but  is there a more exciting moment for a band than being on the way to their third album? How many times has the story been told of an act with two full-lengths under their belt knuckling down, taking the lessons they’ve learned and applying them to the third? It’s one of rock and roll’s great tropes. Our Mother Electricity and Lightning at the Door were hardly warmups, but at the time, not knowing what was coming next, the air of excitement and anticipation is all over At the Garage, and it makes for a truly special listening experience with the context of hindsight.

One has to wonder if perhaps the band didn’t have that in mind when they released it. Again, think of the timing. At the Garage was released on Feb. 10, 2015. On June 18 that same year, they’d announce they’d been picked up by New West Records for the October release of their third album, Dying Surfer Meets His Maker (review here). Sure enough, All Them Witches at this point had already done a fair amount of self-bootlegging of shows mostly from Summer and Fall 2014, but an actual live album, produced and mixed and mastered, is something different. One has to imagine that by Feb. 2015, they’d already been in talks with probably several labels, New West among them, and maybe — consciously or not — At the Garage is the band’s own way of realizing they were about to enter a new stage of their career. Maybe this is All Them Witches saying goodbye to their early days en route to something new.

Unlikely, to be frank. In my experience, All Them Witches have neither been that sentimental about their work or that calculating, but it’s something to consider even in terms of their desire to mark what was the beginning of their tenure as a touring band with a live record to look back on later. And that’s the whole point of live records anyway, right? To have and, as a listener, either say you were there — that show, that tour, that time — or you wish you had been? I don’t know. These five years later, it’s easy to look back on cuts like “Funeral for a Great Drunken Bird” and “Death of Coyote Woman” — which barely holds together on stage, but does — with a feeling of nostalgia. Long before the band toured with Mastodon or Ghost, long before they couldn’t just post one-off goofball jams for the hell of it anymore. That time. It was a special time. That’s all.

All Them Witches will release a new album later this year that they recorded at Abbey Road Studios. It’s the first studio work they’ve done as a three-piece and they tracked it with Mikey Allred just before the COVID-19 lockdown really took hold. I talked to Robby Staebler about it earlier this week and will be writing the bio for it I guess as soon as I have the time to do so. So maybe I’ve got the band on my brain, thinking of the places they’ve gone, the places they still can go with their sound, and the soul that still resides at heart in what they do.

More on that later, I suppose. For now, and as always, I hope you enjoy.

Thanks for reading.

I slept last night, which was a welcome change. Kind of went nuclear with Xanax, ZzzQuil and melatonin over the course of the evening prior to bed, but whatever. Can’t argue with results.

I go back and forth between feeling like I’m cruising through the day and feeling like I can barely keep my head above water. I owe a lot of people messages and emails back. If you’re reading this, I don’t want to waste your time with woe-is-me bitching, but my awake-and-aware minutes are at a premium these days, it seems. Yesterday I was writing the Gimme Radio post from my phone at a sandbox. Right now, The Patient Mrs. has the Toddlerian Pecan while I’m typing this.

And the power just went out and I heard a boom outside, so this might be an interesting day.

…And it’s back on? Bizarre.

Anyway, she’s giving him breakfast, then we’ll go for a run. She has a meeting (virtual) from like 9:30 to 2PM or some shit and it looks like rain, so I don’t know what course the day is going to take, but going running helps even the kid out. Helps tire him out. We go up a big hill in the neighborhood here. It’s good for me too, but I can feel myself becoming compulsive about it, which is precisely why most of the time I try to avoid “exercising” as opposed to just being physically active in some way. Because I don’t need one more fucking thing to obsess about.

But we’ll get through the day, like we do. Bumbling and tumbling or not. I don’t know. We’ll figure it out.

New Gimme show today, if you missed the playlist. 5PM Eastern, listen at http://gimmeradio.com.

I hope you have a great and safe weekend. I hope you and yours are well and that you’re holding up, life and livelihood and all of it.

Thanks. FRM.

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