By Monk
As their name might suggest, L.A. Witch are a triumvirate of black-clad female punk ‘n’ rollers who hail from the seedy underside of the city of angels, beguiling and entrapping us with their energetic and enervating of garage-meets-grunge, and who use their songs to address the issues which haunt that dark underside of the so-called American dream that has become so polluted and dissipated in recent years.
While the band’s self-titled album evolved in a casual, organic way over the course of a few years, resulting in the soundtrack to hazy memories of late night revelries in back alley bars creeping back in on a hungover Sunday morning (or, in my case, last night’s wedding anniversary shenanigans), this follow-up is, by frontwoman Sade Sanchez’ own admission, a much more rushed and urgent affair, written and recorded over the period of just two months at the beginning of this year, in a sort of pre-Covid self-enforced lockdown scenario.
A jangly garage/gutter/surf rock riff sees this power trio start their particular rock ‘n’ roll fire with incendiary intent, Sanchez’ vocals coming across like a hybrid of Susanna Hoffs and Suzi Gardner, possessive of the plaintive quality of the former and the underlying, confined acidity of the latter. ‘Motorcycle Boy’ is a suitably dark and twisted tribute to cinema outlaws like Mickey Rourke, Marlon Brando, and Steve McQueen, delivered with in an appropriately gothic noir-meets-Western mien, before ‘Dark Horse’ proves to be just that, heralding the elements of experimentation to come in its combination of dark folk and classic organ swirls, topped off by a fuzzed out guitar solo that just comes at you from left field and grabs you by the balls, forcing to sit up and pay attention – and, at the same time, grab another cold one and settle in for the rest of the ride to come…
And what a ride it is… ‘I Wanna Lose’ makes you want to do just that: lose yourself in its dense, psychedelic, pulsating vibe which evokes the dark, heady moodiness of those acid-trip fuelled B-movies of the late Sixties, while ‘Gen-Z’ totally exemplifies its subject matter with its inherent laconic mood and laidback groove. Another of the album’s standout moments is the totally, and deliberately ironically so, ‘Sexorexia’, which could well become the anthem for both this album and the band themselves.
The overall impact of ‘Play With Fire’ is that of a pop-punk album that all but eschews the “pop” elements, retaining the catchiness and all important sense of melody but delivering both with a much darker hue, and also those of the “punk” aspect, replacing that with a sense of catharsis and noirishness, while, again, maintaining that mood of dis-respect and self-loathing which the genre always has promulgated so well… and L.A. Witch do promulgate it extremely well.
- ‘Play With Fire’ is out now. You can get your copy HERE.
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