Band: Witch Mountain
Album: South of Salem
Best song: “End Game” is amazing. What a song.
Worst song: “Hare’s State,” while a pretty good song, is far too long.
The more I get back into the music thing, the more I find myself exploring the ins and outs of genre stuff. Often in harder music, that means trudging through a lot of garbage that’s hard for the sake of hard or dissonantly obnoxious. Some stuff is sparse to the point of boring (Earth, Boris), fit for certain moods and certain places. Some stuff is obnoxious and nearly unlistenable (an awful lot of Norwegian black metal).
Like the originators of the genre, Norwegian black metal, the notion of Cascadian Black Metal is near the deepest ends of genre labeling; black metal is a specific kind of metal, which is a specific kind of hard rock, which is a specific kind of rock and roll, etc. Adding the location to it is similar to my saying my familial heritage is Caccamese (not just Italian, but Sicilian. Not just Sicilian, but Western Sicilian/Palermitani. Not just Western Sicilian, but from Caccamo.). It’s overly specific.
Enter Witch Mountain. Untrained ears will hear more similarities to Black Math Horseman (vocally) and Electric Wizard than to similar Cascadian Black Metal band Wolves in the Throne Room, and I’m not sure I completely disagree. Witch Mountain bounces around between blues-rock riffing and doom metal anticipation. Like nearly all American doom metal, South of Salem plays around with a Sabbath-esque guitar sound (Master of Reality-esque, really). “Plastic Cage” has a riff so reminiscent of Tony Iommi’s greatness, it’s tempting to call them derivative. However, the song — really, the album — holds itself under the massive heaviness of the riff largely due to a rhythm section that knows restraint rather the a Brann Dailor-esque forefront role (yes, Dailor pulls it off because he’s the best).
The switch in Witch Mountain came when the band added Uta Plotkin as singer. Novelty is not without its value in hard rock and a female singer is nothing if not novel. For a genre overrun with similar-sounding, caustic singers, Plotkin’s Janis-Joplin-meets-Chan-Marshall sound certainly stands out. And, no, novelty is not the same as a simple outlier. Rather, the novelty showcases a true quality. Plotkin, for the genre, is near-unique. Soulful and powerful, her vocals have a bluesy quality.
Indeed, this is what makes Witch Mountain’s sophomore record so enticing. Metal — again, a version of the earlier hard rock genre — stems, ultimately,from the blues rock of Led Zeppelin and Sabbath. A lot of current metal bands don’t pay any homage to this, which isn’t the end of the world. The genre has progressed and has largely lost the blues in lieu of a different genre. Metal has made its way into a different place. And that’s OK. But, with that, a lot of the melody and creation of the genre is lost.
With Mountain somehow weave the stoner rock aesthetic into the drawn-out doom architecture on South of Salem (a bit of an in-joke on the “witch” part of the band’s name and the geography of their home state). “Wing of the Lord” moves around like a slowed-down Kyuss song overlaid with a female blues singer’s voice, going on without droning.
“End Game” is the most classical Sabbath homage, with a slow build, quick switch and easy crescendo. At under four minutes, the song is — dare I say — as close to radio-friendly as a doom metal record can be. Among a raucous wah pedal-infused — and I say this in the best way — wanking solo, a doubled Plotkin vocal intones a determinist love song (key lyric “my heart’s full of needles and pins/gonna hurt myself again”). The song slows and speeds, playing with dynamics better than the Pixies and harder than post-punk.
It’s easy to say “fuck genre” and I do it often. At best, it sheds a tiny bit of light and at worst, it’s completely meaningless and very confusing. While this may be true in the case of Witch Mountain, South of Salem is a strikingly good record, even if it never became the standard-beareer for Cascadian Doom Metal.
