ninehertz

Eighteen years since their inception, Space Witch emerge once more to unleash only their third album. It is cause for excitement. From their early days, demos and EPs they have been a band with a singular vision of cosmic doom, honed over time to the celebration that was Arcanum, their last album.

We’ve been round the sun eight times since then, but now they return. It promises to be grander than anything prior, a single 37-minute track laid out before us. Perhaps something so epic simply requires that passage of time to conceive and craft.

Despite that ominous length, it wastes no time – there is no long, drawn-out introduction. It quickly sounds enormous, space-rock cast in heavy doom atmospheres. It gradually evolves, turning in a meandering guitar line of increasing madness, a suffocating mass of noise capturing you, before collapsing to noise.

There are occasional surges of pace, frenetic tempo shifts that grab you and spin you around in low gravity. It pushes and pulls through their skilled and potent concoction of space driven noises and the heaviness inherent in the instrumentation, it is intoxicating and claustrophobic at the same time. It is a heady, all-encompassing ride.

The grand doom feel of the middle is rich in a way like Yob have mastered, thriving in the potent cosmic strata. The guitars then build to something explosive in a Slomatics style manner, rumbling forward as its own meteorite when the shackles of gravity are freed, a maelstrom of swirling doom now, the thick and raw guitars thunderous, the synths casting spells in the sky.

There are moments of swampy doom tones, others of cosmic bulk mass with inevitable comparisons to the heavier end of space-rock bands like Vinnum Sabbathi. It is brooding, ever changing, a claustrophobic feel ever present.

Only in its final couple of minutes does that sense subside, as it collapses to nothing but space noises, fading into the void. It is an incredible achievement, the ability to sustain such a hold on you as listener, as witness to this astral event. Space Witch have been a flagship band of the UK doom underground for a long time now, and this is the reason – they stand apart with their vision, now realised to a completion on Mountains of Neptune.