ALBUM REVIEW: The Wytches – Annabel Dream Reader
Courtesy of Nikhil Kanukuntla
★★★1/2☆
There is a crop of psychedelia that has attached itself to Heavenly Records in recent years, or perhaps it was always there. Spin back two decades and you’ll find the label releasing 12″ singles from alternative house act ‘Sly & Lovechild’ , or 7″ singles from twee synthpop group St. Etienne; the former more cold with obscurity rather than hot out of the press. Nevertheless, even at this early stage the label had a certain charm about it that knotted several ‘quirky bands’, acts that had a certain rarity to them. This is of course a lot to do with the producer and founder of the label: Jeff Barrett, who has a thing for the retroactive.
Nowadays, the independent charm of the label is more manifest in druggy, browbeaten guitar bands rather than dance music or traditional rock n’ roll. Already TOY, Temples, Charlie Boyer and the Voyeurs are making waves in the neo-psychedelic nexus; treble-laden trance rock, shades of 70s art punk- they have it all. The observant few could say Heavenly Records are perpetuating an exciting new scene in the catacombs of guitar music. The Wytches for instance (one of the label’s newer additions) can join an admittedly impressive list.
The Wytches themselves are an oddity; the jumpy, pyromaniacal brother in this new family of bands. They are something of pioneers for Heavenly Records, coursing away from their sun-tinged psychedelic siblings into ever darker waters – but let’s not be hasty here, at times one feels like it’s just mud. If you were to study the history of popular music you’d come across many alter egos and personas, The Wytches are a band living the persona and hence have no persona; they live the sound.
Annabel Dream Reader is an album so drenched in reverb one can’t help but wonder if that’s what they use to style their hair with. They look aggressive, they look terrifying, their music is terrifying and it all sounds – to use the common gig vernacular – “fucking immense “. But this is all part of the image the band promotes; they wear the labels ‘horror punk’ or alternatively ‘doom punk’ proudly on their chests. “Graveyard girls swinging a bag like a pendulum”, a line from the penultimate song ‘Crying Clown’ should just about sum up the aesthetic here. Grinding guitars are shrieking out prognostications about night and instability and women or whatever takes their fancy.
There is a very comforting Lo-Fi feel to the album; they have managed to capture the sound that bands of this sort would generally want to capture from themselves – the feel of a live album, somewhere in a cramped, underground venue where the audience stays silent. Doom indeed. This album draws too many influences to even begin to list, but the influence of bands like The Cramps is unmistakably present. Especially in tracks like ‘Part-Time Model’ which incorporates the weird, quasi-spoken word lyrical style of Lux Interior among others. The ‘delay-effect-single-strum’ mechanism is used widely in the album; staying true to their punk roots by keeping the instrumentation simple but loud.
Album highlights would be ‘Robe For Juda’: a guitar riff that sails around the openings of your mind and a relentless bassline that slaps you everytime you try and shift attention to anything else. ‘Summer Again’ is another stand-out track, a mellow tune reminiscent of Brit-Pop in many of its instrumental phrasings.
However, Annabel Dream Reader is not quite the brilliant LP it perhaps ought to have been. Many of the songs, although kick-ass, are positively unoriginal in a way not gratifying enough to make me indifferent to its originality. This makes The Wytches quite ironically a comfort band, the sort of band that requires a listen whenever you’re in the mood for the kind of mood the band puts out. Kristian Bell sings like Jack White at times, the riffs sound like something George Harrison would throw off if he was around in the grunge scene, they compartmentalize great stuff from several other influential bands but make it – I’m sorry to say – merely comfort music.
Annabel Dream Reader is a promising album from a great young band, and the most important foreseeable evolution for them is to try and grow away from a sound put together by others. At times the album hints at gleeful creativity or freshness – slack song structures, unorthodox lyrical matter- but whether they can pull it off sustainably in the future is another matter. Can’t wait for the next release.
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