All Them Witches - the impossible performance

I haven’t written about music since the failure of a weekly entertainment magazine called SPREAD that I founded and ran nearly single handed back in the early ’00s. Music and I have a strained relationship for myriad reasons. Musical performance produced my only experiences with transcendence, as the term is commonly defined. However, nothing else can so thoroughly sour your love of something as striving to pay your bills with said something. Let’s leave it there.


Now to the subject of this writing and my first real essay on anything musical in over two decades. Are you familiar with a Nashville, TN band named All Them Witches? Not many people are if not connoisseurs of obscure rankings of metal/hard rock bands, which is ironic in that All Them Witches are generally regarded as a multi genre/genre busting group.


First allow me to preempt my praise for this band with what I consider their weaknesses which truly boil down to a single weakness. The studio. The aforementioned genre buster label stems from their songwriting craft for sure but their studio work highlights the variability of their interests—including songs recorded with country artist Caitlin Rose and folk artists Erin Rae, fellow members of the Nashville music scene. In a studio setting, armed with all the individual tracks and controls, All Them Witches are a mediocre band at best. Seriously. Their discography is unimpressive, self indulgent, and flat. If I had to describe them in a single word: hollow. Even with the meandering history of personnel which includes some talented multi instrumentalism, even though scaffolded by eclectic influences such as multi national folk music, within the depths of each album, at the core of each collection, lies a cold blank space. I suspect the very diversity of weaponry offered by the studio hinders this band’s actual genius.


This actual genius is on full display in a single, COVID forced live performance recorded in 2020, the year live performance was sacrificed on the alter of lockdown mania. The title of this collection testifies to my previous complaint about All Them Witches being a tad boring. The title isn’t as lazy as it first sounds. It’s an inside-baseball nod to lyrics from a previous album, Sleeping Through the War, “Guess I’ll go live on the internet.” Live on the Internet, in my once-but-no-longer professional opinion, is one of the greatest displays of mood and groove in the history of hard rock. I am cognizant of the hyperbolic tone, trust me. I am 53 years old. A lifetime of listening stands behind this statement. This live recording—sans live audience—provides a clinic on what a band in this era of retro over saturation can achieve in a single moment of time.


As mentioned previously All Them Witches—a primarily hard rock entity—has employed keyboard, violin, harmonica, etc. over the years in an effort to claim their genre bending status. Not here. Live on the Internet is performed as a traditional three piece. Michael Parks, Jr. on bass and vocals, Ben McLeod on guitar, Robby Staebler on drums. If you’d like see the band play these songs, the entire video of this show is available on YouTube, however, my suggestion is to stick with the audio only version. My argument for greatness here is anchored in sound, nothing to do with sight which is an intended salute to Mikey Allred who engineered, mixed, and mastered this performance.


This is not an album review. I will not go song by song stretching for high shelf adjectives to describe these tunes. What I want to do here is spotlight what is missing in music today, what has been missing in music for several decades, and how an almost effortless move on any band or single performer’s part can breath energy back into modern music.


The basic move here is one toward honesty in expression. I defy you to find a more honest live performance—in this broad genre—anywhere over the last decade. What we have in Live on the Internet becomes a trio of musical personalities soaring within the sweet spots of their capabilities. This isn’t the mechanical regurgitation of rote phrasing and beat counting perfection. The band creates life on this recording. Without overzealous intent to showboat or dazzle. Each of the players conveys a perfect understanding of each piece and their part within the superstructure of the performance as a whole.


McLeod’s basic trinity of whah, delay, and amp born distortion elevates his choices of flourish and rhythm to virtuosic proportion. McLeod has become one of my favorite guitarists of late with his talent for restraint. It is his restraint, his decisions on what not to play versus what he could play or what another player in his position might have chosen to play that has won my awe. At no point on this recording do I ever think, “That was uncalled for.” Full disclosure alert: one of the reasons I am enamored with McLeod’s tools lies in the fact that whah, delay, amp distortion were the foundation of my own sound when I played. After years of crowded pedal boards slowly dropping in population as each do-hicky and whatchacallit died for whatever mysterious reason, the revelation that these three stalwarts were all any true guitar work required became doctrinal for me. McLeod’s use of slide in a hard rock setting also attracts me as I too relied heavily on that tiny brass pipe to illicit my favored sounds.


Staebler, with the help excellent sound engineering, has created what is an absolute fortress of consistency behind the beats on Live on the Internet. Any falter in his timing comes as a welcome reminder that he is a living, breathing human source of the percussion. His dynamics are flawless throughout, an achievement rarely accomplished in the modern era of triggers and electronics. His willingness to rely on five or six variable fills is nothing short of glorious revelry in the groove, the mood of the show.


As the other half of the rhythm duo, Parks somehow injects soul into a tone so thick one might think he’s a sorcerer of a flavor found only in cheap fantasy novels. A majority of bass sounds in this genre—especially in a three piece configuration—rely so much on a narrow portion of low end that the subtleties required to emote much, if any mood lies out of reach and yet Parks’ playing here paints a fresco across this confined canvas, one that bellows and brawls in it’s beauty and simplicity.


Parks’ vocals are the true gem amongst the music, in part because what he does can barely be described as singing at all. His monotone delivery strikes one as if they’re hearing a bygone Jim Morrison who, so weary from working his day job as ditch digger, is simply too exhausted to grant you anything more than the his ultra cryptic, quasi-religious poetry in stilted off kilter cadence. It is absolute genius to hear. It flips on its head the notion that vocals must be the spearhead of the performance. Parks proves that not only do vocals not require outlandish, hamming up but they don’t even need to be musical, per se.


In all my declarations that this performance conveys honesty of an overall mood and groove, the songs presented here do in fact meander in sentiment. From the sweeping bleakness of Blood and Sand/Endless Waters to the back-to-basics rock fury of tracks like Saturnine & Iron Jaw, 41, Charles William and Enemy of My Enemy to hypnotic blindsides like Alabaster and Rats in Ruin the songs themselves seem to yearn to break free from the focus of the greater project. Yet the band keeps the entire menagerie on the rails with an iron will. Every tune contains that vein of collective honest intent.


Even the farthest off genre wanderings keep the mood when one would think it impossible. The Marriage of Coyote Woman is concrete delta blues that should clash in every way with the majority of the set list. Still, with the simple commitment to clothing the song in the same honesty as the others, the tune melts into the cauldron. In the same way, Open Passageways and Everest, two un-rock tunes, lacking in distortion or drive, become tasteful fringe on a cloak of darkness. Everest, incidentally, stands out as a breather, a guitar solo instrumental in the vein of sweaty 70’s bands who dreamt of Vikings and forest elves.


By all accounts this band should not be able to make this recording. In a world where the average attention span has corrupted the artistic output on a global scale, this album should not exist. Even bands who claim to have stuck to their principles—Queens of the Stone Age, Tool, etc—have caved to protocol. I’m not saying that on a certain scale All Them Witches is more musically moral than any other band. What I am willing to state without any doubt is that this work, as a whole, is as honest and true to the the craft of performance as any band could be and is most certainly what every band should strive for. This collection, recorded in one sitting, is an achievement. I commend them, even though my adoration is three years overdue.