The Sleeping Shaman
Oozing out of the foul Potteries like molten cheese out of Satan's terrible blackened arse...it's the lords of lysergic leakage, the diplomats of dope, the high priests of the order of the interstellar daemon bitch...SPACE WITCH. You dig? This is a two track promo, recorded in July 2008, and available from the band's shiny new website for two thin pigs and your first born daughter. Or £3.00.
'Cosmic Cauldron' does exactly what it says on the title. It gently bubbles and then spits and finally boils with crushing doom riffage until dark matter is flung into the farther most reaches of the cosmos, a huge ten minute bastard slab of Pink Floyd being anally rammed in their Cambridgeshire greenhouse by a brain damaged Hell's Angel, who is merely a giant retarded flesh puppet of the bent will of the spirit of Aleister Crowley. Imagine that my brothers. Then weep.
'Battle Hag' is a whine of feedback, then a lurching sludge riff, reared on a diet of oatcakes and warm bitter and baked in the black Staffordshire sun. Beware fools, for the stoned tempo breaks into a heavy metal gallop, and we are off, like Judas Priest cryogenically frozen inside a space raft, riding majestically through the asteroid belt, across the dark ether of the Crab Nebulae and into the immense star strewn vagina of the Space Witch herself, shot into her womb to be born again as silver surfers with the eyes of locusts and knackers like burnished cannon balls.
Both tracks are absolute winners, fucking mega heavy like Kyuss or Electric Wizard yet so light of touch and spacey in places, quiet and creeping and eminently progressive. I loved this band ever since I stumbled across their myspace page whilst perusing the page of their Stoke space brothers, the brilliant Rise To Thunder. As I stated in the Berserkowitz review, there are bands in this country who would be elevated to much higher planes of veneration if they were from the cities, swamps and deserts of the United States, instead of the post industrial cesspits of the UK. Space Witch meld psyched out trippy aesthetic with doom sludge power and give birth to a bloated yet beautifully graceful monster foetus that is neither heavy metal nor space punk nor experimental rock but is all of these things and yet none of these things. Instrumental genius. They deserve to record a concept album NOW...Space Witch boldly go where no band has gone before.
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