ALL THEM WITCHES – House Of Mirrors

vote
7.5

• Bands:
  ALL THEM WITCHES
• Duration: 00:43:00
• Available from: 05/29/2026
• Label:

• BMG

All Them Witches, who arrived with “House Of Mirrors” in their seventh studio work and first release for a major label like BMG, return to the scene, leaving behind a moment of notable crisis. The farewell of drummer and co-founder Robby Staebler had left Charles Michael Parks Jr. and Ben McLeod wondering if it still made sense to continue, but the entry of newcomer Christian Powers rekindled the spark of inspiration in them, allowing them to recover that alchemy necessary to carry forward a project that is not based on the overflowing personality of the individuals, but on the interaction and dialogue between the musicians.

For those who are not already familiar with the quartet's proposal, what we can hear between the grooves of “House Of Mirrors” is a distorted and dark rock, tinged with rough blues and rooted in a certain rural and mysterious America, crossed by constant psychedelic veins derived from the stoner.
Compared to the past, however, All Them Witches choose a drier path, which completely abandons long digressions (which however often return in the live dimension), in favor of ten more concise songs, contained in just over forty minutes and recorded in less than a week at Blackbird Studio together with producer Eddie Spear, already working with them at the time of “Sleeping Through The War”.
The opening entrusted to “Red Rocking Chair” is symptomatic of how the band wanted to recover certain sounds. It is, in fact, a reinterpretation of traditional Appalachian folk music: six minutes that slide from a ghostly arpeggio towards a viscous, almost doom riff in a continuous alternation between robust electric moments and melancholic passages.
Immediately afterwards, “Culling Line” changes register, embracing a warmer approach, with a progression that culminates in a solo with an almost Gilmourian. The most direct moment comes with “Hold Up, Say What?”, driven by Powers' insistent drums, while “Aethernet”, sinuous and hypnotic, represents perhaps the best moment of the album.
The second half, however, seems to prefer more nocturnal atmospheres, with “Go-getter” in the role of a brief melancholic and subdued interlude, “The Welterweight” which embraces the language of the ballad with results as classic as they are effective, and “Saturn Song” which accompanies us gently until the curtain closes.

What can we say, in short, about “House Of Mirrors”? A solid album, played with evident newfound enthusiasm, in which the return of Allan Van Cleave on keyboards adds depth and colour: perhaps there remains that feeling of wanting to wink a little too much at certain more mainstream sounds of indie rock and in some moments of the second part there are some passages that go a bit in circles (for example in “Angel On The Wayside”), even without obvious writing defects.
But for a band that until two years ago was even considering closing up shop, finding this freshness is in itself an unexpected result. Go ahead like this.