Album Review: The Well, …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals
With sinister fascinations, choice riffs, and doomly overcast, The Well present their fourth album, …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals, as their first outing through Spaceflight Records. Though the band have toured plenty in between, it’s their first full-length in seven years since 2019’s Death and Consolation (review here), and in the nine-song and 39-minute succession, they make up for lost time with the underlying sharpness of their craft, the thoughtfulness of their arrangements, particularly of vocals between guitarist Ian Graham and bassist Lisa Alley — the band is completed by drummer Jason Sullivan — and an unmitigated penchant for hooks that begins quickly as the High on Fire-esque bombastic intro riff to opener “Season of the Flame” gives way to a nod and duet vocal that makes even the verse catchy, never mind the refrain, “See the sun, it’s getting low/Under the sign of a downcast arrow.”
Momentum is quickly on their side, and if some of these songs are older, like second track “Love Cult (Xmas)” — which is about, wait for it, a cult — has been around for a few years, then clearly the time woodshedding at least some of this material on the road (roadshedding?) has been to its benefit. Throughout its run, …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals balances atmosphere and directness of structure, and with opening duo “Season of the Flame,” “Love Cult (Xmas),” the later “Love Look This Way” and closer “Other Girls” helmed by Bryan Richie (The Sword, also Spaceflight Records) and the remaining five tracks — “Between the Bodies,” “Mother Leeds,” “New Hallelujah for the Damned,” “Mystery Babylon” and “Dillinger’s Requiem” — recorded and mixed by Chico Jones, the album gives a sense of progression in terms of sound, getting darker as it goes.
It might also be the most melodically complex work The Well have done to-date, or at very least that on which Graham and Alley are the most confident together on vocals. The harmonies in “Between the Bodies” or in the first half of the later “Mystery Babylon” are relevant examples, but by no means the only ones. Their joint approach has always been a distinguishing factor for The Well in terms of dynamic, as they move between individual parts, sneering, crooning, and so on, and with …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals, they find ways to highlight melody in pieces like “Love Look This Way” or the baglama-laced finale “Other Girls” following on from the penultimate interlude “Dillinger’s Requiem,” which comes with a spoken word narrative and seems to have had the working title “Oud to Joy.” So be it. Both “Mother Leeds” and “New Hallelujah for the Damned” are hard-hitting. The former layers in acoustic guitar (it might be Graham‘s baglama, honestly) toward its finish, and is the longest song at just over six minutes, where “New Hallelujah for the Damned” arrives with a layer of ambient pulls complementing a doomier chug riff. I don’t know that I ever thought of The Well as being influenced by Trouble or that school of classic doom metal.
Of course Black Sabbath are always a factor, and you can hear that directly in “Between the Bodies” on side A, but “New Hallelujah for the Damned” has a more forward push, fleshed out in an almost garage-doom/theatrical midsection before the last verse and tambourine-backed solo, and it lands more in line with that foundation. Maybe that’s spliting hairs in terms of ‘heavy this’ or ‘heavy that,’ but it’s intriguing on a nerd level to hear The Well manifesting different ideas and moods at different times on the same record.
The second half of …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals plays out with its own intention as it moves toward the witchy, hooky “Other Girls” rounding out, and as “Season of the Flame” set side A in motion, so too does “New Hallelujah for the Damned” feel introductory, if also less willfully catchy. It sounds like digging in, and on that level, “Love Look This Way” is a fitting answer as well, with its long, sample-topped intro (is that Terence McKenna; too British?) before its real lumber takes hold, only to drop out into a psychedelic solo and payoff, a change in structural purpose that ultimately serves to enrich the album’s progression as a whole.
The subsequent “Mystery Babylon” feels like a return to ground somewhat, but that might just be a result of the way it moves quickly into its first verse and raw impact of Sullivan‘s drums, the riffs they’re punctuating and the tempo-pickup behind the fuzzy solo later on before they tease a big slowdown and actually just end the song, shifting fluidly with a fadeout into the spoken “Dillinger’s Requiem,” which I’m pretty sure is Graham narrating over the percussion, baglama, etc., as a minute-or-so’s departure placed well to let “Other Girls” stand on its own for its cultish posture and atmospheric focus, a consumingly dark heavy rocker at its core with more going on than just that. The closer feels horror-themed, but is more playful about it than one might glean from that — so, goth? kinda. — with Alley and Graham together delivering one more memorable chorus before the last build ebbs.
For a band who’ve been at it for nearly 15 years since their first 7″ and have spent much of that time touring, what …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals accomplishes isn’t necessarily surprising — though it’s certainly a welcome return after seven years — but it is reassuring to hear them both tighten their craft to such a degree and consciously work to convey how multifaceted their appaoch actually is. To put it in a cliche, it’s been a bit but their time hasn’t been misspent, and these songs benefit from the work that’s been put into them, whichever side you might happen to have on at any given time. They’re not shy about engaging with genre, but remain firmly planted in a niche of their own.
The Well, …And Flames Ran Like Living Animals (2026)
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