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All Them Witches, Effervescent: Forward and Back

all them witches effervescent vinyl and lp

Nashville four-piece All Them Witches initially released their Effervescent EP last June with about as little fanfare as possible, depositing it on YouTube for anyone who might be interested in finding it. A free digital version (review here) followed about a month later, and it’s to the credit of both the band and the self-recorded material that even after making it universally available digitally, there was enough of a response to warrant a self-released physical version. The available-at-shows-only 12″ Effervescent is still technically an EP, though if you were to take both tracks included and put them side by side, the runtime would be a little over 50 minutes. This is because the single song that makes up Effervescent appears once on each side. The second time around, it’s backwards. Yes, backwards.

The really terrifying part about it is that it works. Sure, All Them Witches — who are newly signed to New West Records for their impending third album and the follow-up to 2013’s Lightning at the Door (review here), also digitally issued first with a physical version later — probably could’ve taken a live track, or their version of “Born under a Bad Sign” or some other rarity, and stuck it on side B and been done with it, but since the 25-minute instrumental “Effervescent” was released, its greatest appeal has been its hypnotic, molten psychedelic vibe, a classy, dreamy jazz that doesn’t even need to sample a rainstorm to make you think you might be hearing one while it plays out, and the band are right in their assumption that the vibe is maintained when “Effervescent” on side A is answered by “Tnecsevreffe” on side B. By then, consciousness is long gone anyway.

And the shift from forward to back is made easier by the fact that “Effervescent” has a decent amount of backward layers anyway. The song is comprised of two larger movements at the front and back and one shorter in between — you can see the change in the patterning of the LP, but for keeping track, the first jam is roughly 13 and a half minutes long, there’s a minute-long transitional march, and then the second jam picks up right before the 15-minute mark to build from the ground up across the remainder of the runtime — and since that midsection piece is backwards on the original, it makes a weird sort of sense to have the band play off that in this reworking. In “Tnecsevreffe,” that part takes on an eerie, almost industrial quality around Robby Staebler‘s drumming, long departed from the smooth bass work of Michael Parks, Jr. or the interplay of Ben McLeod‘s guitar and Allan van Cleave‘s Fender Rhodes that makes the second part of “Effervescent” (or the first part of “Tnecsevreffe,” if you’re keeping track of the reverse) so memorable in its nod.

Still, coming from the opening movement of “Tnecsevreffe,” which more or less begins with the somewhat more bombastic backwards version of the apex of “Effervescent,” it’s not as if a context for “weird” hasn’t already been playing out for the last 11 minutes or so. The last 13 minutes of “Tnecsevreffe” have their weirdo shakeout as well, but are less structured overall — not that any of it sounds particularly structured backwards — whereas in “Effervescent,” the central guitar figure that emerges in the back half feels more grounded than the opening movement, which comes across if not more improvised than at least more laid back. Though the whole thing is pretty laid back. And groovy. And psychedelic. And deep. Man, that mix runs deep. It’s not lush in the sense of being overblown, but the moody sensibility that takes root in the first part of “Effervescent” — much bolstered by Van Cleave‘s ambient keys — is a huge part of what has given the track such return-listen appeal over the last year.

That said, there is a point throughout “Effervescent”‘s 25-minute run at which one could point to any individual member and say, “That guy makes the band,” because the truth is that whether it’s Parks‘ nestled-in groove and tonal warmth, Staebler‘s ghost-noting snare, McLeod‘s ability to step forward for a lead and then melt back into the overarching jam or the pervasive atmosphere that Van Cleave seems to cast at will, it’s all necessary as a part of the whole affect. One knew prior to Effervescent that All Them Witches were more than competent jammers — both Lightning at the Door and their 2012 debut, Our Mother Electricity (review here), demonstrated that plainly enough — but Effervescent was an outright sampling of the kind of fluidity they could work solidly within and the chemistry that was coming together between them. I’d argue that chemistry, which makes Effervescent the more-than-a-stopgap release that it is, is still in its formative stages.

As All Them Witches have begun to tour and are moving toward their New West debut this fall, they’re by no means a band that has stopped growing either in terms of their songwriting or in terms of how they collaborate instrumentally on stage and in the studio. For the already considerable achievements they’ve claimed sonically at this point in their career, Effervescent proved when it first came out that they were by no means ready to stagnate or fall into a formulaic approach, and it seems fair enough to read the fact that they paired the song with a backwards version of itself on this vinyl as only one more signal that those who might think they know what to expect from the band are bound to be mistaken. All the better.

All Them Witches, Effervescent (2014/2015)

All Them Witches on Thee Facebooks

All Them Witches website

All Them Witches on Bandcamp

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