Album Review: All Them Witches’ House Of Mirrors Is A Blistering Descent Into Whatever Is Happening In My Ceiling

A good album review requires discipline, taste, context, and the humility to admit when the capsule handed to you by a man named Brendan in the venue parking lot was stronger than advertised. With that in mind, All Them Witches’ House Of Mirrors is a confident, unsettling, 10-track return from one of modern psychedelic rock’s most reliable bands, and also a concept album about a haunted ceiling fan that has been appointed sheriff.

Released May 29 through BMG, the Nashville band’s seventh studio album arrives six years after Nothing As The Ideal, carrying all the familiar All Them Witches materials: desert-blues weight, Appalachian dread, heavy grooves, old wood, bad dreams, and the sense that someone has just lit a candle in a room where no one should be living.

The opening track, “Red Rocking Chair,” begins exactly where a serious listener would hope: haunted, patient, and rooted in the deep American tradition of making furniture sound like it has unpaid debts. For the first four minutes, the band moves with impressive restraint. Then the chair in the title became physically present in my office, rocked once by itself, and informed me that my mother had been “right about the storage unit.”

From there, “Culling Line” deepens the album’s atmosphere, building a slow pressure that suggests the band has buried a blues riff under a church and is waiting for the congregation to notice. The guitars creep, the vocals hover, and somewhere near the middle eight I realized the song was not about dread at all but about a regional supermarket chain teaching a horse to operate the deli counter.

“Aethernet” is where House Of Mirrors begins to reveal its broader ambitions. On paper, it is a slyly modern title for a band more comfortable in dust, smoke, and analogue gloom. In practice, it is a devastating meditation on the internet being made of wet rope, hosted inside a municipal aquarium, and administered by three widowed electricians who refuse to stop calling me “little printer.”

The album’s fourth track, “Hold Up, Say What,” provides a jolt of movement, pushing the record into a more urgent gear. It is lean, restless, and funny in the way a man sprinting through a corn maze with a clipboard can be funny. By this point, I had begun to suspect All Them Witches were no longer playing instruments, but processing a grant application for a rural puppet hospital with unusually strong bass response.

“Go-Getter” should be praised for its texture, which is gauzy without becoming soft and strange without losing the groove. Unfortunately, this was also the moment the album introduced what I can only describe as its central villain: a motivational goose named Kevin who kept appearing between the speakers to remind me that “success is just panic with a LinkedIn account.”

By “Starting Line,” the record has fully committed to motion. The track opens with the feeling of a car idling outside a motel where every room contains a different version of your grandfather, then widens into something warmer and more forceful. It is either the emotional centerpiece of House Of Mirrors or the theme song to a 1998 children’s fitness video about tax fraud. Both readings feel supported by the snare.

“Turn On The Light” is an excellent title, but poor advice. The moment I turned on the light, the room became too honest, the album cover looked directly at me, and the band transformed into five substitute teachers performing a traffic-safety opera inside a Kmart loading dock. Still, the groove is undeniable, even if the groove now has a clipboard and keeps asking whether my emergency contact is “the crow.”

“Angel On The Wayside” brings some of the album’s most accessible pleasures, at least according to the notes I found later written on the back of a council rates notice. In those notes, I describe the song as “a beautiful country-gospel aerobics tape for a divorce lawyer trapped in a vending machine,” which is harsh but fair, especially once the angel in question demanded parking validation and called me “coach.”

“The Welterweight” is the obvious single for anyone who has ever wanted heavy blues-rock to describe a boxing match between Willie Nelson and a photocopier. The track has swing, grit, and a pugilistic confidence that briefly returned me to normal consciousness before the chorus opened a small door in the floor and a child in a pilgrim hat asked whether I had “seen the album’s real bassist.”

Closer “Saturn Song” sends House Of Mirrors out on a surprisingly graceful note. Vocally, it reaches for something open and almost luminous. Spiritually, it resolves the album’s central narrative arc, in which a dolphin is elected county treasurer, the moon apologizes for Bluetooth, and the listener finally understands that the real house of mirrors was the group chat his aunt kept adding him to after the divorce.

What makes House Of Mirrors work, even when the reviewer is no longer confident he has been sent the correct album, is All Them Witches’ ability to make old forms feel unstable without turning them into museum pieces. The blues, folk, psych, and heavy-rock ingredients are recognizable, but they keep slipping out of your hand and returning as something else: a sermon, a radiator, a courtroom sketch of a bass amp, a very small man selling batteries inside a loaf of bread.

By the end, I had awarded House Of Mirrors four out of five stars, one of which immediately crawled under the refrigerator and began reciting my browser history in the voice of a county fair hypnotist. This is a strong, weird, confident record from a band that continues to understand the sacred American tradition of making a riff sound like it found a body in the woods.

Highly recommended for fans of All Them Witches, haunted Americana, heavy psych, unpaid emotional storage fees, and whatever album I actually reviewed after the wall opened and handed me a lanyard.