I Heard All Them Witches’ House Of Mirrors, And It Sounds Like Someone Found A Second, Smaller Church Under The First Church

I have spent two days with All Them Witches’ new album House Of Mirrors, and I regret to inform several dads in heavy cotton tour shirts that it is good.

Really good, actually. Annoyingly good. The kind of good that makes a man named Brett stand near the back of a venue with both arms folded, nod once every 48 seconds, and later describe the organ tone as “necessary.”

The Nashville psych-blues band’s seventh studio album opens with Red Rocking Chair, which everyone has already heard and everyone has already correctly identified as music for driving past a closed antique mall during tornado weather. It starts like an old folk song being remembered by the last guy at a campfire, then turns into a swamp sermon with amplifier debt.

A YouTube commenter asked whether this means we can call All Them Witches “doom blues.” Unfortunately, yes. We can. We have lost that battle.

Culling Line is where the record first starts behaving like a basement with opinions. Charles Michael Parks Jr. sings, “I sold my Sunday shoes to a man with no shadow,” which sounds like something he would absolutely murmur while Ben McLeod makes a guitar pretend to forgive its father.

Damn.

Aethernet is either about the internet, death, Tennessee infrastructure, or a router that saw the face of God and immediately voided its warranty. The chorus goes, “Motherboard moonlight, chew through my name,” and if you think that lyric is too stupid to work, congratulations on being unfamiliar with rock music.

Hold Up, Say What? has the funniest title and the least funny mood. It stomps in wearing a bar-band disguise, then spends five minutes turning into a zoning violation. Parks keeps repeating the title like a man who has just been told his soul renewed at $14.99 a month.

Go-getter is not motivational, unless your career coach is a damp wall. “Climb that ladder, boy, every rung is made of teeth,” Parks sings over a riff that sounds like Human Resources after midnight.

The already-released Starting Line works better in the album than it did floating around by itself, where fans had to decide whether it was too accessible, secretly great, or proof that everyone on Reddit needed to calm down in a very loud way. In context, it is the front hallway. You wipe your feet there before the house starts moving.

Then Turn On The Light arrives and the album gets nasty. The line everyone will misremember correctly is, “Turn on the light, I want to see what’s been forgiving me.” McLeod’s guitar tone here is less “tone” than “evidence.” Allan Van Cleave’s keys hang over it like someone left a funeral parlor open overnight.

Angel On The Wayside is the pretty one, which means it still sounds like a doomed man warming his hands over a bad decision. Very rude. Very effective.

The Welterweight has already been out long enough for listeners to call it their favorite, complain about the drums, praise the drums, miss Robby Staebler, welcome Christian Powers, and ask the band to come to Brazil, Chile, Indonesia, Australia, Germany, and one specific Pittsburgh show. That is how you know the song is working. Nobody begs a mediocre band to cross an ocean.

The closer, Saturn Song, is exactly what its title threatens. Slow, cosmic, faintly ridiculous, and long enough for a listener to develop one sincere opinion about municipal water. “If Saturn rings, don’t answer, he only calls collect,” Parks sings, which may be the dumbest lyric on the album and also the one I most want carved into a bar.

Here is the tracklist:

1. Red Rocking Chair
2. Culling Line
3. Aethernet
4. Hold Up, Say What?
5. Go-getter
6. Starting Line
7. Turn On The Light
8. Angel On The Wayside
9. The Welterweight
10. Saturn Song

So, is House Of Mirrors the best All Them Witches album? Shut up. That is not how this band works. You get the album, you live inside it for three weeks, you decide the third track is underrated, you buy a shirt that fits badly, and then six years later you tell someone it was actually the turning point.

What matters is that House Of Mirrors sounds like All Them Witches still have unfinished business with electricity, dirt, guilt, and whatever keeps happening in rooms with no windows.

Score: 8.6 haunted preorder confirmations out of 10.