Album Review: Mammoth Volume, Raised Up by Witches
Lysekil, Sweden’s Mammoth Volume don’t necessarily have the element of surprise on their side as they did two years ago when they released their third album, The Cursed Who Perform the Larvagod Rites (discussed here), some 21 years after their second, 2001’s A Single Book of Songs, but neither do they seem to need it. A quick turnaround has done nothing to dull the individualist creative drive behind Raised Up by Witches. Comprised of nine tracks running a 45 minutes united mostly by an returning theme of fuzz and the vocal melodies from Jörgen Andersson, Daniel Gustafsson (guitar, bass, keys, flute, percussion) and Nicklas Andersson (drums, bass) — bassist Kalle Berlin is the only one without a voice credit — the album begins with “The Battle of Lightwedge” in building both volume and narrative in compact fashion to hit into a rolling, fuzzy payoff, keeping a distinctive sense of progressive quirk in the arrangements of keys and vocals.
This too is revealed as something of a thread as “Black Horse Beach” brings angular start-stop jangle-strums of guitar, but as with Dutch outfit Astrosoniq — who are something of an analogue for the heavier-shoving moments here. whether it’s the end of “The Battle of Lightwedge” or the aggro-ier chug offsetting the clearheaded alt-rock sway of “Scissor Bliss” — it’s mostly the performances and the weirdness itself carrying the listener from one side of the record to and through the other. That is to say, it all works as an album because the band made it that way. It’s not weird by happenstance. It’s supposed to be weird, written and/or built up to have more going on at any given moment than a single genre designation can hope to encapsulate, and uniform mostly in its striving against uniformity. It is distinctly, inevitably, Mammoth Volume.
And as a new generation of listeners gets introduced to the variable notion of just what that means, the definition itself is likewise expanding. Those who heard The Cursed Who Perform the Larvagod Rites will find Raised Up by Witches both more cohesive unto itself and more willing to toy with the tenets of genre, whether that’s the heavy stretches noted above in “Scissor Bliss” or the subsequent “Diablo III – Faces in the Water” providing one of the record’s central hooks while keeping the heavier momentum fluid. Desert rock, folkish harmonies, classic-style boogie, progressivism and heavy metal are all on the operating table, and while Mammoth Volume are precisely none of them on the whole, these genres and the Beatlesian melodicism of “Lisa” as it rambles with acoustic guitar sweetly pastoral chimes and percussion around a steady undercurrent of organ. A sample from the 1962 film David and Lisa feels far removed from the purposefully over-the-top Thin Lizzy-style solo of “Diablo III” — that song also seemingly a prequel to two tracks off the last album; time is a construct of the mind — but lends depth to the title, and opens to bouncing intertwined melodies.
It’s tongue-in-cheek, maybe, but still touches on pop gorgeousness as casually as most people eat breakfast, capping with another bit of dialogue for good measure. Pop comes and goes throughout Raised Up by Witches, and is ultimately one more tool the band uses to manifest their intentions in songwriting, but they’re no more bound to it than they are to traditional notions of what makes a given track heavy or whatever else. By the time they get to the transfigured yacht rock keyboard behind the initial vocals of the title-track, Mammoth Volume have well demonstrated that the chicanery is more than just for show. It’s not just that the band put together a bunch of verses and choruses and then decided to overdub a bunch of other stuff, or that they’re kitchen-sinking the arrangements — because they’re not — with elements that don’t fit and calling it experimental. These songs work. “Raised Up by Witches” works. It and they just work in a way that emphasizes how on their own wavelength Mammoth Volume are as relates to most if not all of underground heavy.
That’s fine. A band can do their own thing without being good too, though. Mammoth Volume avoid that trap through naturalism and by bringing their audience with them as “Lisa” and “Raised Up by Witches” give over to the tense chug of “Cult of Eneera,” and by setting a broad enough scope that just about whatever they want it to contain, it can. Zappa-jazz in “Scissor Bliss?” Sure. “Cult of Eneera” going extra-intricate in the rhythm at the midpoint before throwing punches of wah-bass to an effect funky and dense, making its own kind of fun? How could it be otherwise? “A Tale About a Photon” picks up the prog-boogie wherever they left it off, and is melodic despite the bit of push coinciding, with a low-key focus on dynamic, though it’s not exactly like “dynamic” was lacking in the leadup to the Raised Up by Witches‘ penultimate inclusion.
They sneak a hook in before they’re halfway done, but it’s less about verse/chorus trades than the linear trajectory they’re moving through and the changes happening on the way, with chimes later and who-knows-what being banged on. There are still changes in the vocals, as even in moving toward the recesses of side B, the band are using everything they have to get max-oddball before their tale unravels to finish, leaving closer “Sången om Ymer” to bounce and threaten a fuzzy overload and go big on melody instead. It spaces out in the middle for a bit of soundscaping, but there’s bass still punching through, and the melody returns and ends in purposefully not-grand style. Like much of the proceedings throughout, this is suited to what Mammoth Volume are doing across the span of Raised Up by Witches in being likewise expansive and not-overblown in a way one might call miraculous if there wasn’t so much obvious work behind it. Turns out they didn’t need the novelty of a comeback to start with. They thrive in this material, and whatever they’ve done before, it’s what they accomplish here and might accomplish going forward that are the most exciting.
Mammoth Volume, Raised Up by Witches (2024)
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