All Them Witches - Sleeping Through The War album review

Hazy cosmic future-blues from the anti-Black Sabbath

All Them Witches Sleeping Through The War album art

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Stoner rock is crying out for an overhaul. Thankfuly, All Them Witches are taking it apart and piecing it back together again. Not for them the slavish Iommi worship of your average bong-huffing longhairs. The Nashville band’s fourth album parties like it’s 1969 and 2019, looking forward to the future as much as it does backwards over a well-trodden past.

The languid bliss of opening track Bulls is propelled by intermittent rocket thrusts of sludgy noise, while the likes of 3-4-5-7 and the harmonica-assisted digital blues of Guess I’ll Go Live On The Internet lope and slide rather than grunt and bluster. Sleeping Through The War apparently has some kind of political undercurrent, but its (thankfully) obfuscated by Charlie Michael Parks Jr’s unhurried drawl and the layers of fuzzy atmospherics that, hopefully, point to the shape of stoner rock to come.

Dave Everley

Dave Everley has been writing about and occasionally humming along to music since the early 90s. During that time, he has been Deputy Editor on Kerrang! and Classic Rock, Associate Editor on Q magazine and staff writer/tea boy on Raw, not necessarily in that order. He has written for Metal Hammer, Louder, Prog, the Observer, Select, Mojo, the Evening Standard and the totally legendary Ultrakill. He is still waiting for Billy Gibbons to send him a bottle of hot sauce he was promised several years ago.