L.A. Witch—Play With Fire

California, the world over, symbolises a particular kind of whacked-out transgression. A crackling nervous system of dark magic and mysticism covers the state like a tattoo. San Francisco plays host to Anton Le Vey’s infamous Black House—the origin of the Church of Satan. And, until Tarantino rewrote history last year, Los Angeles remained the site of the infamous murders committed by Charles Manson’s commune. Ritual, morbidity and ghoulishness seem sprinkled across the sands of the West coast.

In this spirit, L.A. Witch deliver a collection of tracks whose kitschy dips into the occult live up to the band's name. While this album, Play With Fire, acknowledges the endemic goofiness ascribed to witchcraft in 2020, it’s no less spirited or intense for doing so. Vocalist Sade Sanchez’s guttural and commanding tone sounds as controlled as it does throat-shreddingly raw. It’s not unlike Wytches frontman Kristian Bell. Both singers' styles touch an unspoken universality, but are nigh-impossible for anyone else to reproduce. And both bands are served well by sardonic sensibilities: less "black-metal-cemeteries-at-night", more "spooky-ghost-train".

L.A. Witch give equal attention to their city’s musical and occult histories. Play With Fire sounds like a grungy death rattle of 60s idealism; the final fatal moments of Easy Rider. The freewheeling hippy spirit has careened into a ditch. Now it sits limbless and mired in self-reflection, dissatisfaction, anxiety. ‘Fire Starter’, the album’s opener, couldn’t make this any clearer with the vocal hook, “I got sun in my eyes./ I got too much to do, and not enough time.” None of this is to say Play With Fire is dour. It retains the vital energy of its forebears, channeling that energy inward and burying itself in dark and personal interior spaces.

Fast-forward twenty years to sequence another piece of the album’s DNA; its echoes of the 80s hardcore scene. Play With Fire combines the anecdotal songwriting of X with the smirking fury of The Germs to great effect. It rages without tantruming. L.A. Witch’s coolness, objectivity and sly detachment open their songs to listeners. And their LP carries off its form as a historical hodgepodge with panache. You have to squint to see any of the strings.

Play With Fire will no doubt be a hit among fans of the Aussie psych scene, and bear particular resemblance to Flightless five-piece The Murlocs. But there’s a twang of Americana that sets L.A. Witch apart. Play With Fire feels rooted so specifically in its birthplace that it’s like a sonic Hollywood sign; severe and symbolic, with a broad and encompassing view of its hometown.

Play With Fire, releasing 21st August, is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Art Feynman—Half Price at 3:30

Half Price at 3:30 is ostensibly a neo-psych album, but incorporates a multitude of interesting and inventive flavours. Its opening track ‘Dtime’ formally resembles Cocteau Twins; scuzzy, washed-out, affirmative and ecstatic. Compositions have the feel of Joni Mitchell or Joan Baez. Everything seems geared in service of vocal melodies which climb and collapse, delivered in a gentle vibrato. Shuffle beats and finger-picked guitar further strengthen the association. But Art Feynman combines these myriad influences into a wholly unique package.

Feynman’s vocals are autotuned and post-processed almost without exception. In the early 2000s, these production techniques accrued status as cheesy or maximalist. In years since, they have undergone a shedding process. Now they signify a plaintive, delicate work—and Feynman plays these two roles against one another. Half Price at 3:30 positions itself at the unnerving intersection between goofy and truthful.

Vocals sit at the forefront of mixes, and a tension results from their simultaneous clarity and obfuscation. Feynman also distorts his voice though natural means. His delivery and timbre switches up between tracks. For instance, on ‘Physical Life of Marilyn’, he adopts the eccentricity of Ashes to Ashes era Bowie.

This wilful fragmentation of identity defines Feynman’s album as something both intimate and guarded. It is as though a truth is being laid bare or confessed, but only partially.

Songs’ structures similarly conceal intentions, defy themselves, unravel and transform. Often they act as lures, disarming with chilled first halves which develop into an ambitious jams or crescendos. ‘Ideal Drama’ and ‘Night Flower’ are both stunning examples. They're infectious and unpredictable tracks which could have sustained their length twice over. As a whole the album conceals itself—its generosity comes track by track. Feynman keeps you chasing a stick while feeding you carrots.

Half Price at 3:30 seems disinterested in the idea of ‘cohesion’ in an album. Songs share only loose commonalities. This permits a greater sense of freedom and unpredictability than many other neo-psych offerings, which eventually collapse under their own lack of experimentation. Too few acts in the genre recognise the irony of imitating a genre defined by its journeys into uncharted territory. Feynman allows this album, again and again, to unpeel a layer from itself to reveal more beneath—but never reaches the core. His reticence and guardedness, then, serves a vital purpose. It preserves the sense that this album is a gift which can never be exhausted.

Half Price at 3:30 is available for purchase and streaming here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

Ohmme—Fantasize Your Ghost

Fantasize Your Ghost, the second album from Chicago rock duo Ohmme, contains both gentility and fearless invention. This contrast, and others like it, generate a good deal of the LP’s strength. By turns, it can sound muddy and psychedelic, yet clean and precise; anthemic but emotionally intimate.

Virtuosity and experimentation are ever-present, courtesy of bandmates Sima Cunningham and Macie Stewart. Their flourishes are not self-serving—they instead serve the band’s drum-tight songwriting. It's clear that Cunningham and Stewart are both superb musicians. But they have no desire to flaunt it, no performative swagger. Less focused, and more egotistical artists swamp or obscure their work in itself. This duo’s noodling usually supplements their songs’ thundering crescendos, nestled unobtrusively in the mix. There’s too much to cover here—but some squeals and pizzicato plucking in ‘The Limit’, and gentle panning drones in ‘Some Kind of Calm’, serve to elevate the material.

Opener ‘Flood Your Gut’ is a gorgeous piece somewhere between PJ Harvey and Syd Barrett, whose elements disperse, elongate, and entangle through its second half. ‘Selling Candy’ stretches the extremities of Ohmme’s sound still farther, with sweetly-sung close harmonies in a call-and-response with overdriven guitars.

Elsewhere, ‘Some Kind of Calm’ pulls of the rare trick of pretending it’s not doing anything. Like a duck whose legs thrash underwater, it glides past seemingly without effort. But a million subtly-deployed tricks in its playing and production ensure it heavies the eyelids seductively, lulling and soothing instead of boring.

And on the total opposite end of the spectrum is ‘Sturgeon Moon’, a jagged and raucous song where Ohmme wear their sense of play most proudly. In the song’s melodic angularity, and through the John French-esque drumming of Matt Carroll, the ghost of Captain Beefheart is revived. Perhaps its sturgeon is a distant cousin to the trout of Van Vliet’s mask.

Though a glib comparison, that Ohmme recall Beefheart speaks to their greatest credit. Ohmme are rare, in that they recall the genuinely interesting facets of classic psychedelia, sustaining and surviving its spirit rather than its barest and most superficial aesthetic qualities. In the soulless and commercial world of neo-psych, beacons of artistic freedom like Fantasize Your Ghost shine even brighter.

Fantasize Your Ghost, released June 5th, is available for streaming and purchase here.

Words: Andrew O’Keefe

King Krule—Man Alive!

Archy Marshall cuts the same silhouette as Bowie’s Thin White Duke—but the similarities don’t end there. Born stone’s throws from each other (respectively in Southwark and Lambeth), both artists transcend their earthliness, defy categorisation, and are fans of the sax. Marshall is larger, and smaller, than life; transparent, would he not be so fascinating to observe.

Man Alive! has the difficult task of following Marshall’s lauded (but still not-lauded-enough) The Ooz—a 2017 album which assembled all the best things about roughly twenty different genres into a cohesive whole. Man Alive! is constructed from the same blueprint, but with some noodly edges shaved off; a leaner, tighter, and more focused piece of work than its predecessor.

Its early energy is explosive and irresistible. An opening salvo of four or five songs is almost impossibly exciting, peaking with the beat-driven ‘Stoned Again’. Replete with Marshall’s psychotic backing vocals and thundering drums and bass, it’s a sensory overload in the best possible way.

The adrenaline rush soon submits to a cool beauty, an unravelling of Marshall’s anger and its replacement by gentle washes of hope. It’s an unfamiliar mood being explored here, but its first steps are far from tentative. A throughline of discordance tells us this could collapse at any time—who hasn’t sabotaged their own happiness at one point or another?—but the big take-homes from Man Alive! are its lush crescendos; hypnotic, looping chord sequences; and its uplifting lyrical content (“don’t forget you’re not alone”).

The looseness of tracks like ‘Slinky’ will lead them to be overlooked. But any fan of The Ooz will know that Marshall’s vignettes and diversions are often just as rewarding as the keyframe cuts of his albums. Man Alive is absolutely stuffed with these little golden nuggets, which add so much character to an album already bursting with it.

Marshall is able to create music which sounds global and local, ageless and contemporary, mystical and empathetic. The boy can do it all, and is destined to go down as one of the greats—so don’t be one of those thickos who wasn’t listening at the time.

Cellular is out now on XL Recordings/Matador Records. Directed and animated by Jamie Wolfe Ink and paint assistant - Annapurna Kumar https://www.jamiewolfe.c...

Man Alive! is available for purchase here.

Words by Andrew O’Keefe

Toy — Happy in the Hollow

Toy, The Horrors’ gloomier younger brother, have been guilty of not living up to the promises that their self-titled debut deafeningly announced back in September 2012. Since then, 2013’s Join The Dots and 2016’s Clear Shot felt too easy, resting in-between mechanical krautrock rhythms and swirling shoegaze. Although very ‘in vogue’ over the last seven years, Toy never struck the balance between great songwriting and spectacular walls of sound that their first full-length managed.

However, Happy in the Hollow feels like a watershed moment for the Brighton band. Having split with Heavenly Records in 2018, signing with Tough Love and then releasing their first self-produced record, Happy in the Hollow was always going to be a make-or-break album.

The first track, ‘Sequence One’ instantly feels more direct than anything on their last two releases, maintaining the fingerprints of their well-documented influences, but with a greater emphasis on melody and a much more confident and convincing vocal performance from Tom Dougall. This song is emblematic of the album generally, as melody seems to have been the key driving force behind much of the songwriting on Happy in the Hollow. This is refreshing to hear, and gives the band a vitality that hasn’t been present since 2012.

There are still moments where Tom’s thin and ghostly vocals can’t quite go toe to toe with the rest of the band’s instrumentation, such as on the track ‘Energy’, where the rattling pummel of Charlie Salvidge’s drumming and the angular post-punk stylings of the guitar line make the vocal performance seem rather limp. On the song ‘Strangulation Day’, the sustained synth notes allow the vocals to take center stage, but they are just not quite strong enough to carry the song. Mercifully, this is one of the shorter tracks on the album.

However, this record is definitely a step in the right direction for the band. The focus on melody has bolstered both the jangle-pop sensibility of tracks like ‘Mechanism’ and ‘You Make Me Forget Myself’, as well as the extended soundscapes in ‘Jolt Awake’ and ‘The Willo’. The latter track reveals a new side of the band’s sound, taking influences from sixties and seventies folk rock bands that give the album much more focus, reigning in the slightly more indulgent psychedelic freak-outs that they were guilty of on previous efforts. 

Happy in the Hollow is ultimately the documentation of a band finding a more unique and definitive sound that relies slightly less on wearing their influences on their proverbial sleeve. Stepping into uncharted territory, both personally and musically, has reignited that spark that many saw when the band first erupted onto the scene. Is it flawed? Yes, but Happy in the Hollow has a claim to being the band’s most coherent and engaging release to date, proving we’re not quite finished playing with this particular toy just yet.

Curious newcomers should seek out Toy’s self-titled album TOY, their single ‘Left Myself Behind’, and the ‘Make It Mine’ EP. Happy in the Hollow is available for streaming and purchase here.

Words by Jack Dice