Witch Mountain have become by-words for doom metal. For seventeen years now the band from Portland, Oregon – with original members Rob Wrong and Nate Carson still at the helm on their respective guitar and drums – have ploughed the deep subterranean furrow of that particular musical sub-genre. Despite a long hiatus throughout the first decade of the new millennium, Witch Mountain’s discography boasts four albums the most recent of which, Mobile of Angels continues to possess all of those reassuringly familiar doom metal characteristics. Yet for all of its portentous, slow-motion riffs, heavy, tumultuous rhythm and ear-piercing vocals there is much more to this record than a mere reliance on the grandest Black Sabbath traditions.
Opening song ‘Psycho Animundi’ may well start in the most customary of Witch Mountain fashion – an ominous, lurching Sabbathian riff over which singer Uta Plotkin spits out vitriolic words like poisonous bile – yet as it staggers towards an anticipated denouement it can still find the time and space to accommodate a delicate interlude that would not have been remotely out of place on an early ‘70s Fotheringay folk-rock album.
The epic discomfiture of ‘Can’t Settle’ re-enacts a battle royal between the potent psychedelic blues of Jefferson Airplane and the apocalyptic cataclysm of Candlemass. On ‘Your Corrupt Ways’ – accounting for one quarter of the record’s length and its undoubted centrepiece – Plotkin once more steps out of the shadows and into that hallowed vocal place vacated by Grace Slick after the singer’s retirement from active Airplane service. She soars high over the song’s bludgeoning, unrelenting groove as it marches on and on along a road to nowhere.
With its whirling organ and religious imagery the album’s spectral title track moves even further away from the more traditional doom metal template, and ‘The Shape Truth Takes’ reveals a lightness of touch one does not always associate with such a demoniacally heavy art form. Here the vulnerability and exquisite range of Plotkin’s voice also reinforces how much she will be missed as she bids a fond farewell to the band after her five year tour of duty. As a valediction to this particular incarnation of Witch Mountain, though, Mobile of Angels makes for the most impressive of swansongs.
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Mobile of Angels was released on 6th October 2014 via Svart Records
