Louder AAA
It’s six years since All Them Witches released their last album, Nothing As The Ideal. That’s six years of massive changes on the world stage, from presidents to pandemics, dubious wars to heroic Moon explorations. For the band, on a personal level it’s been all change, too. When frontman Charles Michael Parks Jr (just Parks to those who know him) eventually joins Classic Rock and guitarist Ben McLeod on Zoom, he’s on the porch of his home in the wilds of rural Arkansas, “somewhere in the Ouachita mountains”, where he and his wife live an outdoorsy existence and their only friend is an elderly tractor driver.
But in 10 days’ time they’re moving to Nashville, where there’s bright lights, noise and people, traffic and good food. “Just to give it a shot for a while and get out of the woods for a minute,” he says.
It’s been all change on the band front as well. In fact, it’s fortunate that there still is a band. In 2024 they came within a hair’s breadth of calling it a day when drummer and founder member Robbie Staebler quit.
The plan was to honour the festival dates they had booked, and then for McLeod to concentrate on the engineering and production work he does from his home in St Augustine, Florida, when he’s not on the road. Parks, meanwhile, would have carried on with his Jr Parks solo project. “And I don’t know, I’d go bag groceries at Walmart or something. Learn a trade. Learn how to weld.”
It was only when they brought in drummer Christian Powers for those few last dates that they found a renewed sense of purpose. “After a couple shows, we realised that it didn’t suck,” says Parks.
The frontman shrugs off questions about the reason for Staebler’s departure as “boring. You know, every band has lost members, and it changes and it grows”.
“It’s definitely forced us as a band to get creative all over again,” McLeod admits. “I feel like we were kind of stuck in a rut for a little bit. But just having a breath of fresh air and a new drummer opened up new experimentations for us. So I guess that’s the silver lining of losing a core member of a band – you almost get to start over.”
Fans will be queuing up to buy Powers a pint when they hear All Them Witches’ excellent new album House Of Mirrors, then, because they’ve hit gold with it. It’s fat-riffed, grungy stoner-doom power married to weighty psych experimentation, kicking off with a reinvention of an old traditional song, Red Rocking Chair, set ablaze with a breathtaking guitar riff. But what really sets the record apart is the blistering blues – not the mournful kind, the raging kind – at its foundation.
“I grew up ear-deep in the blues,” says Parks, a lifelong fan of Abner Jay, Skip James and Lead Belly. “You think about what black-metal guys go to jail for, and all the heinous shit they do, but Lead Belly went to jail twice for killing guys over cards, and was so charming and played guitar so well he got released from prison twice for just being a nice guy. But he’d killed two people over a game of poker. That’s as metal as fuck.”
![All Them Witches - Red Rocking Chair [Official Visualizer] - YouTube](https://img.youtube.com/vi/6I221jU1XO0/maxresdefault.jpg)
McLeod, meanwhile, fell into a love affair with electric blues as a child when he discovered a Hendrix blues compilation.
“I’m going back to more primitive stuff now,” he says. “If I hear a white-boy blues band now where it’s a squeaky clean mix, I just want to vomit.”
Another new-album highlight, The Welterweight, with its intricate storytelling, reveals Parks’s family history as a source of inspiration, warts and all.
“My great-grandfather was a welterweight boxing champion in Alabama,” he explains. “But he also was not a very good person. It’s not a heroic story; he was kind of an asshole. That song is born out of expectations, first with people, second with your own intentions on how to move about with other people, with society.
"A lot of people underestimate the people around them and how tough they are and how hard they can love and how generous they are, like you never really know. So that’s what that song is about, the hidden capacities of people.”
All of this comes at a point when the band are enjoying a higher profile than ever. They signed a big management deal. They’ve risen in popularity from underground alternative beginnings to audiences that are bigger with every tour.
More impressively, they’ve done it all by carving out their own niche. They’ve toured as the first act on a bill with Primus and Mastodon, and played shows with The Sword, but mainly ploughed their own furrow, building their own fan base without piggybacking on others’ success. Their only other support slot, on tour with Ghost, showed why that was the right move.
“The best way to describe it is ten thousand people just waiting for you to get off the stage,” says Parks. “And everybody in corpse paint looking at you, politely hating your music.”
That dry, droll sense of the absurd is a running theme with the two men. You get the impression that they’re not starry-eyed about the industry. In fact they’re extremely matter-of-fact and businesslike, describing the band as a ‘company’ more than once.
Living in different states, they don’t tend to hang out when they’re not on tour, and they’re very different people, too. Considering how they’ve changed over the past decade, McLeod admits to having a hot head and a quick temper. “I’ve been trying to have a better attitude and a more positive mindset on the road,” he says.
Parks is the opposite. Previously he tended to live in his head and stay under the radar, but is now getting better at taking leadership and making decisions. “Maybe we’re just getting finer with time, aged like a fine wine,” he says.
It certainly seems that way from a musical point of view. And as good as House Of Mirrors is, they’re looking to improve, having weathered recent storms and reignited their creative spark.
“I just want to continue making interesting albums,” says McLeod. “I still don’t think that we’ve had the album yet.”
“Yeah, there’s something in there that’s trying to come out,” Parks says in agreement. “I think what it takes is spending a little more time around each other to release the beast. But there’s something coming. Don’t know what it is, but it’s something back there.”
House of Mirrors is out now via BMG
