All Them Witches : "Sleeping Through the War"

This is my first time giving these guys a shot. They are pretty impressive right out of the gate as they start off with a very smooth and stoned breeze that reminds me of the Verve until they stomp on the fuzz. This gets thing heavier, but not what we would consider metal however "Bulls" is a great song. The songs begin very compactly written with " Don't Bring Me Coffee" falling some where between garage rock and boogie. They cruise along into a more straight ahead form of 70s rock on "Bruce Lee" . Lyrically I like the calm creepy glaze this song has. They remind me of a less rowdy Queens of the Stoneage here. You can also here the bass player take off here.

The album is well produced and the vocals seems to have a knack of sitting right where they need to be. There is a fair amount of Sabbath influence on "3-5-7". The drugs seem to be settling in here as it takes on more of a jammy quality.The creep into a more surreal groove that has an almost progressive quality to it on "Am I Going Up" which makes this one of the album's strongest songs.  Lyrically interesting the jam factor goes up on "Alabaster" . "Cowboy Kirk" continues to find the band cruising the scenic with a little more twang coming from the vocals. The groove is more angular and the song opens wide to make way for the guitar solo in places for some reason it brings Kings of Leon to mind.

The album ends with the snarky lyrics of the ten minute "Guess I'll Go Live On the Internet" . This has more of blues back bone to it's smooth groove as the vocals are more spoken than sung. The jamming really goes into high gear on this song. Six minutes into this indulgence and cold stone sober I begin to wonder where else can they take this for the next four minutes. The answer is to just shine on like crazy diamonds and jam it out to the bitter end. I don't mind jamming as long as the pay off is big enough to justify it and that doesn't happen here. I'll round this one up to a 9 as they jamming misdirection is the only time the album flubs the dub for me .