Posted in Whathaveyou on April 24th, 2024 by JJ Koczan
Not the kind of announcement you expect to see on a given morning, but founding drummer Robby Staebler has announced his departure from Nashville’s All Them Witches. What you see in blue text below was sent out in an update to Bandcamp followers, and it comes as the four-piece are (were?) set to begin a tour through the southeastern US following their appearance this weekend at Austin Psych Fest. Comprised until today of Staebler, bassist/vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., guitarist Ben McLeod and Rhodes pianist/violinist/keyboardist Allan Van Cleave, the band also have European shows ahead of them this summer, including a stop at Hellfest in France and other festivals besides. I have no idea what the status is of any of those shows, and the best I can tell you is to keep an eye on the band’s social media, which is where any further update is likely to come from.
Staebler, with a restless energy on stage that gave movement to even the band’s most minimalist moments, brought fluid energy and expansive creativity to All Them Witches across their six to-date full-lengths — the latest, 2020’s Nothing as the Ideal (review here), featured drones and tape loops that as I understood it were in no small part his contribution — and non-LP releases like the Baker’s Dozen singles series (posted here) that carried them through the end of the pandemic on 2022 en route to a 2023 spent mostly on the road for whole-album performances and other shows. Since Van Cleave rejoined in 2021 after quitting the band following 2017’s Sleeping Through the War (review here), they’ve wanted nothing for momentum. I guess maybe when you’re done you’re done.
But in addition to drumming and other sundry noisemaking, Staebler has also served as the primary visual artist for All Them Witches since their inception. And like his playing, his painting style is not something that will be easily replaced. I have no info on what his departure means for All Them Witches as regards the dates in the two posters below — maybe he’ll play them and leave after, for all I know — but Staebler will continue with the experimental audio/visual project Uvways, as he says below, and if All Them Witches do keep going, there’s no question any new player brought in will be a marked change in dynamic.
My best to Staebler and to Parks, McLeod and Van Cleave, whatever the future brings. If I hear more I’ll post it:
[UPDATE April 24: Guitarist Ben McCleod posted the following in the band’s Facebook group a short time ago:
Hello everyone. ATW will be making an official post later today, however I wanted everyone to know the shows are not canceled. We have a replacement drummer for the time being and will be fulfilling all these shows.
Thank you for your patience and understanding. We will see you soon.
Best of luck to Robby and his future endeavors. He has been an asset to this band and he will be missed.
-Ben
The band followed up with a collective statement, specifically addressing the coming shows and their plans going forward:
So there you go. Staebler‘s original announcement and All Them Witches‘ tour dates still follow below, but it’s encouraging to have some clarity and to know that the band will keep going.]
ALL THEM WITCHES FANS All good things must come to an end. At this time I’ve decided to step back from ATW and put my energy into other music and projects that I love. Thanks to everyone who has supported me and the band I created and labored over. The fans have made my dreams comes true in every way and I’m extremely grateful for you all. I put every ounce of energy and resources I had towards building something truly unique and honest that I could stand behind. Moving forward I feel it’s important to follow my intuition and inspiration. I’ll be releasing two new albums this year under UVWAYS with faces you know and some you don’t. If you want to follow what I’m doing I set up a Patreon where I’ll be doing everything from drum videos to live chats as well as monthly art and merch deliveries. Check out patreon.com/UVWAYS, visit www.uvways.com for paintings and prints. Follow @uultrasoundss for new music and @ultraafree for my merch company that promotes unity and freedom in the tune of rock and roll. The world is a vampire. Stay awake.
It would be hard to have a discussion about the most influential bands of the last decade in underground heavy and ignore All Them Witches. You’ll pardon me if I don’t try. The Nashville-based four-piece issued the quizzically-titled Dying Surfer Meets His Maker (review here) on Oct. 30, 2015, as a twice-over pivotal moment for group. First, it was their label-debut on New West Records, to which they signed earlier in 2015 as they began to make higher-profile appearances at fests like Bonnaroo and others, giving them an opportunity to reach a broader audience. Second, while they’d had the limited A Sweet Release EP (review here) out earlier that year and regularly put other odds and ends on their Bandcamp, as well as live shows for a minute there, the nine-song/47-minute Dying Surfer Meets His Maker was the proper follow-up to their self-released 2013 sophomore LP, Lightning at the Door (review here), which was already regarded as a landmark by the time the next album showed up, also marking the point at which they became a touring band.
Those two factors aren’t to be understated, neither is how All Them Witches met the moment. Even more than Lightning at the Door did coming off the band’s debut — 2012’s Our Mother Electricity (review here), which was released in 2013 through Elektrohasch as All Them Witches became the first American act on the label run by Stefan Koglek of Colour Haze — Dying Surfer Meets His Maker seemed to actively work against expectation. At a point when the four-piece — bassist/vocalist Charles Michael Parks, Jr., guitarist Ben McLeod, Rhodes-ist/violinist Allan Van Cleave and drummer Robby Staebler — could have shifted their approach with a direct eye toward growing their listener base, which they ended up doing anyhow, they dug in. Dying Surfer puts its emphasis on fluidity, on a whole-album presentation, on instrumentalism. Consider “El Centro” emerging from the subdued acoustic-begun opener “Call Me Star.” It wasn’t the first time they put a semi-intro up front — recall the previous album had “Funeral for a Great Drunken Bird” — but All Them Witches grew out in terms of reach instead of up in terms of volume.
Their songcraft loosened so that “El Centro,” which wants nothing for heft or groove in its eight-plus minutes as the longest included piece, and an atmospheric stretch like “This is Where it Falls Apart,” with McLeod leading a harmonica-laced jam in a style of liquefied heavy psychedelic blues that All Them Witches are now widely credited with creating, or the willfully soft melodic exploration in “Mellowing” before “Open Passageways” — which is the kind of song that doesn’t come along every decade and should be appreciated as such in composition and arrangement — served as the gateway to the transitional “Instrumental 2 (Welcome to the Caveman Future)” ahead of the closing pair “Talisman” and “Blood and Sand/Milk and Endless Waters,” the latter instrumental but for some spoken parts early and late and the former an essential mood piece, its lyrics vague and characteristic of Parks‘ obscure poetry in telling a story from an assumed point of view. Even “Dirt Preachers,” which is so much Dying Surfer‘s outburst moment, loud and tense, breaking into its chorus like the Kool-Aid Man through the wall of your mom’s house in your ’90s daydreams, subverts expectation in how it’s constructed. It’s got a hook, to be sure, but in production and delivery it is introverted and lets the listener find it instead of reaching out at the risk of coming off cloying. If All Them Witches have ever been anything, it’s not that. “Dirt Preachers” is more memorable than catchy.
It’s neonostalgic hearing that and the record from whence it comes, not the least because the band have three subsequent studio LPs — 2017’s Sleeping Through the War (review here), 2018’s ATW (review here) and 2020’s Nothing as the Ideal (review here) — and multiple live releases and so on in the eight years since, but even now there are new aspects of Dying Surfer Meets His Maker that reveal themselves in terms of how the component songs interact. One can hear them working in pairs, as “Call Me Star” moves into “El Centro,” the purposeful turn of “Dirt Preachers” slowing into its emotionally resonant finish and smoothly giving over to the comedown jam “This is Where it Falls Apart,” and “Mellowing” serves as a lead-in for “Open Passageways”; though, if it’s an intro, it should be noted that it’s longer than the song it’s introducing. Does that make “Open Passageways” an outro?
This procession grows more complex but no less fluid as “Instrumental 2 (Welcome to the Caveman Future)” softly meanders on electric guitar, jams through its midsection and quiets again in the two and a half minutes before “Talisman” takes hold and builds to its finish of singing lead guitar and subtle angularity amid a tone warm enough that it seems to be what the lyrics are craving, and “Blood and Sand/Milk and Endless Waters” capping by building on that shimmer, trippy but not lacking motion thanks in no small part to Staebler‘s kick drum, which along with the prominent fuzz in Parks‘ bass, is the last element to leave as they make their way out, the three sets of song-pairs leading to the blurring of lines that is the final trilogy, likewise raw and lush, fully dug in and brazenly their own. They could’ve started writing hits for nonexistent radio. They went the other way and emerged stronger for it.
All ThemWitches last year released a series of monthly singles called ‘Baker’s Dozen’ (posted here) that continued to put light on the variety in their approach and the strength of their jams, they put out the physical pressings of the late-2020 Live on the Internet stream capture, and earlier this year, they launched a tour playing multiple nights in major markets, each night doing a different album in full, Dying Surfer Meets His Maker among them. Having left following Sleeping Through the War, Van Cleave re-completed the four-piece by returning in 2021. He would seem to be welcome on all fronts, internal and external. Three years (i.e., 2020-’23) is the longest All Them Witches have gone without an LP release since their inception, but they’ve never really stopped, and they’ve never stopped growing. Dying Surfer Meets His Maker is an essential showcase of that ethic, and an uncompromised view of who the band were becoming, in addition to being one of the foremost releases of the heavy ’10s.
As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.
—
Well, we seem to have made it through camp this week, which is the same thing I said last Friday with zoo camp before getting the call from the counselor to go pick up The Pecan early because apparently like the last two hours of the entire week was a bridge too far in terms of her holding it together. It helps that what we’ve been calling “farm camp” — at Foster Fields, in Morristown, a working historical farm — is two and a half hours per day instead of eight or whatever zoo camp was. Still, on Wednesday we rolled in to pick her up and got to hear about her biting a counselor. Again.
I could go on and on here about my concerns, worries, etc., as regards The Pecan. Between the ever-present behavioral issues, attention deficit, hyperactivity, lack of concern for the feelings of others, basic mental health and periodically violent temper. She’s trying. I know she is. She has a good heart. I wish she had an easier time.
Tonight I’m going to see Metallica? At Giants Stadium? Weird, I know. It’s a long story. My sister went to the Guns ‘n’ Roses/Metallica/Faith No More tour in 1991. I even got to watch about 45 seconds of Metallica that night, at the tender age of nine. She bought tickets to tonight and Sunday I think mostly so she could take her older son (15 and accordingly brooding) and our mother (76, needs new knees and had cataract surgery this week, which went well), but, you know, family outing. I’ve never seen a Metallica show, and while the thought of watching some of the openers and then exposing myself to the potential of hearing about James Hetfield’s lifestyle determining his deathstyle makes my stomach turn, my mother will have a good time and I’ll remember my mother having a good time. That’s what it’s about. I’m not reviewing. I’m sure it will be fine.
Next Tuesday I travel to Portugal for SonicBlast. My first time there. The timetable got released a couple weeks ago and it’s a beautiful lack of scheduling conflicts that’s going to make for a few busy days. Three full fest days and a pre-show. That I’ll be covering, words and pics, as much as I possibly can.
5:30 now and I expect The Pecan up any minute, so I’ll leave it there for the week. Monday and Tuesday are already full before I fly out Tuesday night, a Medicine Horse premiere and maybe a Desslok premiere? Lots of videos lately. I might try to sneak in another review as well, just because there’s a ton going on, but it depends on time and how anxious/distracted I am about the journey to be made. I also have a new camera bag that replaces my cosmic backpack, which The Pecan took to camp three weeks ago and it got organic bug repellant spilled in it, smelling like ginger on an apparently permanent basis. I need to pack that, make sure I have earplugs, Advil, chargers, whathaveyou.
In any case, I wish you a great and safe weekend. Have fun, drink water, watch your head, don’t bite anybody who doesn’t want to be bit, and so on. Thanks as always for reading.
Posted in Whathaveyou on January 18th, 2023 by JJ Koczan
Between March and June, Nashville’s All Them Witches will play special full-album sets in various ‘major market’ cities across the US, on what’s not quite a tour and not quite not. The records in question are inarguable. From 2013’s Lightning at the Door (review here) to 2015’s Dying Surfer Meets His Maker (review here), which was their first LP for New West Records, to 2017’s pointedly lush Sleeping Through the War (review here), the hardest part is choosing which one you’d want to see them play most. And if you can only make one night, well, they’re doing two sets per show, so maybe you’ll still get “Open Passageways” with Allan Van Cleave on violin at the Sleeping Through the War date. That’s what I’m gonna hope for, anyhow.
Any single night or all three, there’s no wrong answer. You’ll recall All Them Witches spent 2022 touring and unfurling their ‘Baker’s Dozen’ singles project (posted here), which was completed last month. One awaits word of a follow-up to 2020’s Nothing as the Ideal (review here), but, you know, if they maybe wanted to take a month to catch their collective breath first, it’d be hard to hold that against them.
Join us for an evening (or three) with All Them Witches. Each night, for three nights, we will play a different record front to back – “Lightning At The Door,” “Dying Surfer Meets His Maker,” or “Sleeping Through The War” – and an additional standard set. A very limited amount of three night tickets will be available. See you there.
All Them Witches is: Charles Michael Parks, Jr – bass, vocals Ben McLeod – guitar, vocals Robby Staebler – drums, vocals Allan Van Cleave – Rhodes piano, keys, violin
Posted in Bootleg Theater on December 30th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Today brings the final two installments of All Them Witches‘ Baker’s Dozen singles series. The Nashville four-piece throughout 2022 have been issuing one song at a time on the last Friday of each month, and I guess rather than keep it going into January, they opted for a blowout. No complaints. Both cuts are available to stream in the videos below and are linked through to various digital outlets. I don’t know if they or the whole collection will make their way to Bandcamp or not, but it doesn’t seem unreasonable.
As they have all along, in this series and out of it, the band explore disparate ideas in sound in the last two Baker’s Dozen singles. “Mama is a Shining Star” is an initially-drumless, proggy wash of melody laid out across 10 minutes of psychedelic drone swells, woven violin, even some processed vocals, and gorgeous, true-to-title shimmer set to a procession that breaks past its halfway point to more minimalistic fare, holding a waveform pattern that hints at more until its eventual fade — the hidden messages delivered after the hypnotized state is induced. Their experimentalist side coming forward, satisfyingly as long as you don’t go into it expecting a hook or drummer Robby Staebler‘s restless shuffle, it recalls some of the loop-based movements on 2020’s Nothing is Real (review here), and is encouraging in its freeform style of further adventures to come.
“Real Hippies are Cowboys” pairs organ and pedal steel with layers of electric guitar and bass over its instrumental eight-minute stretch, which rises gradually out of initial lines of guitar and does have more of a full-band feel, drums and all. It’s not their first foray into twang by any means, but it does make a point of its delve into country-psych leaning more toward the one, then the other in its later reaches, while staying loyal to both sides before the jam shows itself out in fading fashion. If that’s to be the epilogue of Baker’s Dozen — 13 of 12, as it were — then the underlying message of All Them Witches remains consistent in their unpredictability. Throughout this entire series, one has never really known what’s coming next. For a band who’ve been around more than a decade now, have enjoyed more success and influence than most ostensibly ‘heavy’ acts in that time and have six full-lengths under their collective belt, that they can keep their audience guessing without sacrificing the quality of their work shouldn’t be discounted as a consideration. They keep winding up in new places, thankfully.
The entirety of Baker’s Dozen is streaming below in the various players. The last two songs are first, then the rest all the way back to January’s “Blacksnake Blues,” in suitably jumbled order.
All Them Witches is: Charles Michael Parks, Jr – bass, vocals, acoustic guitar Ben McLeod – guitar, vocals Robby Staebler – drums, vocals Allan Van Cleave – Rhodes piano, keys, violin
All Them Witches, “Hush, I’m on TV”
All Them Witches, “Holding Your Breath Across the River”
All Them Witches, “Tour Death Song”
All Them Witches, “Tiger’s Pit”
All Them Witches, “6969 WXL The Cage”
All Them Witches, “L’Hotel Serein” official video
All Them Witches, “Acid Face” official video
All Them Witches, “Blacksnake Blues”
All Them Witches, “Fall Into Place” official video
Posted in Bootleg Theater on November 25th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Not to take anything away from the odd bit of 18-minute jamming or languid bluesy psych me generally, but this one is an easy immediate favorite from All Them Witches‘ ongoing ‘Baker’s Dozen’ singles project that has found them posting a new track every last Friday of each month throughout 2022. The song reminds of the edge that was best about pre-nü metal ’90s rock radio — heavy alt vibes — and the title “Hush, I’m on TV” feels very much in line with the somewhat tongue-in-cheek view the Nashville-based once-again-four-piece have always seemed to have regarding their own success, up to and including a seemingly abiding skepticism of how that is defined.
Whatever they may think of the response they’ve garnered from a fanbase built up over the last decade-plus, All Them Witches continue to do that work and do it exceedingly well, distinguished among their generation and among the most reliable yet unpredictable active bands I can think of in the realm of heavy music, certainly of the last 15 years, if not longer. Their work is a thing to be appreciated, and their ability to be self-reflective without seeming indulgent or any more navel-gazing than their aural sarcasm wants to be is only pay off why.
Dig this one a lot. Dug the last one — the whole year’s worth are below — and will probably dig the next one. I think we get two more of these? Fair enough. Here’s number 11, Bettie Page and all.
All Them Witches is: Charles Michael Parks, Jr – bass, vocals, acoustic guitar Ben McLeod – guitar, vocals Robby Staebler – drums, vocals Allan Van Cleave – Rhodes piano, keys, violin
All Them Witches, “Holding Your Breath Across the River”
All Them Witches, “Tour Death Song”
All Them Witches, “Tiger’s Pit”
All Them Witches, “6969 WXL The Cage”
All Them Witches, “L’Hotel Serein” official video
All Them Witches, “Acid Face” official video
All Them Witches, “Blacksnake Blues”
All Them Witches, “Fall Into Place” official video
Posted in Bootleg Theater on October 28th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
At this point, Nashville’s All Them Witches have unveiled well more than an album’s worth of material with their ‘Baker’s Dozen’ singles project, releasing one new song (plus a bonus at some point, I guess) on the last Friday of every month, and as today brings the mellow psych-blues poetry reading and fuzz leads, loops and righteous meander of “Holding Your Breath Across the River,” it brings into relief just how broadly scoped their sound is. Some bands never put out the same record twice. Throughout 2022, All Them Witches have extended that ethic to the songs themselves.
They’ve spent much of October touring Europe, killing it on a bunch of sold out dates by all accounts I’ve seen on social media, and proceed with textured ambience in “Holding Your Breath Across the River” like it’s no big thing, guitar and synth drone that in most contexts would be enough to qualify as experimental here still just part of the backdrop for the telephone-effect mostly-spoken-word vocals that remind just how dug-in this band can be when they want.
I don’t know where they’re headed next, but I feel comfortable predicting that whatever Nov. brings from them, it, again, will be something different. Ergo, enjoy this one while it’s fresh.
Have to wonder by now if the band are planning some larger release for all these songs — you can stream the entire project so far below — even if it’s just putting them up as a collection on Bandcamp. I’ve bought one or two on Amazon over the course of the year to-date — and I don’t know if you’ve ever purchased digital music from that particular outlet, but it’s a terrible experience — but I wouldn’t mind giving it all a front-to-back listen I guess sometime early in 2023, perhaps. If I’m lucky.
In any case, peace out, October:
All Them Witches, “Holding Your Breath Across the River”
All Them Witches is: Charles Michael Parks, Jr – bass, vocals, acoustic guitar Ben McLeod – guitar, vocals Robby Staebler – drums, vocals Allan Van Cleave – Rhodes piano, keys, violin
All Them Witches, “Tour Death Song”
All Them Witches, “Tiger’s Pit”
All Them Witches, “6969 WXL The Cage”
All Them Witches, “L’Hotel Serein” official video
All Them Witches, “Acid Face” official video
All Them Witches, “Blacksnake Blues”
All Them Witches, “Fall Into Place” official video
Posted in Bootleg Theater on September 30th, 2022 by JJ Koczan
Tonight, Nashville four-piece play Nottingham, UK, as part of a Fall UK/European tour that will take them through almost all of October. I mention it both because, well, they plug the tour with the link below and because the latest installment of their ongoing ‘Baker’s Dozen’ monthly singles project is called “Tour Death Song,” which, as you might guess, is also about touring.
It’s always seemed like All Them Witches have had a complicated relationship with being on the road. They’ve been at it since at least 2013 and they’re a professional band, so that’s how they make their money, by going places and playing. Obviously that’s been a rough economy for the last two years, and they’ve never pretended that it’s easy work, but as soon as stuff opened back up, All Them Witches were quick to get back out.
As they move through this year-long project, this would seem to be the most direct acknowledgment of the effect of lockdowns on the band, though I’ve listened through a couple times and I didn’t catch any lines about “hey we miss our families and personal lives so please buy a t-shirt,” and I somehow doubt they’d be so crass. Parks, who I’m just going to call by his last name since that’s how I think of him, features in the video playing acoustic guitar, and generally speaking is a better lyricist than that.
Like much of ‘Baker’s Dozen,’ it’s a moody vibe here, but it tips more toward the structured end of songwriting than some of the jammier fare that the series has wrought. As ever, All Them Witches sound most of all like All Them Witches. I very much hope to see them at some point soon. It’s been a few years.
All Them Witches is: Charles Michael Parks, Jr – bass, vocals, acoustic guitar Ben McLeod – guitar, vocals Robby Staebler – drums, vocals Allan Van Cleave – Rhodes piano, keys, violin
All Them Witches, “Tiger’s Pit”
All Them Witches, “6969 WXL The Cage”
All Them Witches, “L’Hotel Serein” official video
All Them Witches, “Acid Face” official video
All Them Witches, “Blacksnake Blues”
All Them Witches, “Fall Into Place” official video
We’re eight tracks deep now into All Them Witches‘ year-long ‘Baker’s Dozen’ singles project, and “Tiger’s Pit” continues the band’s streak of offering something different each time out. Though that’s basically their thing anyhow, which makes it doubly impressive that I could’ve just as easily started out this post talking about how consistent they are and been no less correct.
I’m struck by the breadth of the production for “Tiger’s Pit,” as well as the heft of the tones that fill it, reminding and almost threatening how heavy the Nashville four-piece can be when they do choose — shout out to their 2019 single “1×1” (posted here) — but also that they are much more than just that. More song-based than some of the other ‘Baker’s Dozen’ pieces so far, certainly more straightforward than July’s “6969 WXL The Cage” — it had its own post but just stream it below in the giant block of videos-to-date — it follows a linear course and just kind of ends in a fade, but still leaves an impression through its verses and overarching clarity.
A new track every month has been a fair amount to keep up with, but it brings to light the creative scope of All Them Witches at this point and the trust they’ve engendered that they can basically go wherever they want and those who follow will follow. As for new listeners, well, there’s plenty to dig into, for sure, and so long as you keep in mind that they almost never want to do the same thing twice, you should be fine. Might want to go with a proper full-length, though, for initial digging. Still, if this leads to that somehow, all the better.
All Them Witches is: Charles Michael Parks, Jr – bass, vocals Ben McLeod – guitar, vocals Robby Staebler – drums, vocals Allan Van Cleave – Rhodes piano, keys, violin
All Them Witches, “6969 WXL The Cage”
All Them Witches, “L’Hotel Serein” official video
All Them Witches, “Acid Face” official video
All Them Witches, “Blacksnake Blues”
All Them Witches, “Fall Into Place” official video
