Listening Notes

All Them Witches — House of Mirrors

House of Mirrors album cover

This is classic All Them Witches: House of Mirrors is unselfconsciously sinister, heavy riffs and desert rock, a little deranged.

Some of their recent albums had good stuff on them but weren't consistently incredible. Here they hit the theme end to end. The hard stuff is gritty and rough, exactly what I want to hear. The less hard stuff blends in seamlessly. It doesn't feel like filler, it feels of a kind, with perfect segues.

One of my favorites, "Starting Line", keeps popping into my head. Something perfectly desperate about this track. Maybe a reflection of the feeling of an intensifying and increasingly hopeless rat race that a lot of people experience these days. It could just as easily be a Depression-era ballad, the soundtrack to Upton Sinclair's The Jungle, that sort of thing.

This album is a masterpiece. It's evidently very hard to accomplish an album that says something with this degree of consistency. Especially impressive that these guys are still doing it.