Witch: Witch (ochre gold vinyl) [TEE PEE]

Why you'll love it

This Tee Pee repress puts the album on ochre gold vinyl. It's heavy, riff-driven doom in the Black Sabbath tradition, with Dinosaur Jr's J Mascis pounding the kit and Kyle Thomas singing and playing guitar.

This edition

• Ochre gold vinyl

About the album

J Mascis is best known for his guitar in Dinosaur Jr, so it's a treat to find him behind the drums here. Witch teamed him with Kyle Thomas on guitar and vocals, Asa Irons on second guitar and Dave Sweetapple on bass, and their 2006 debut is a love letter to slow, colossal seventies riffs.

Seven songs stretch across two sides, and almost all of them run past five minutes, which is exactly how doom likes it. "Seer" opens with nearly eight minutes of lumbering, smoky heaviness, "Soul of Fire" is the punchy single, and "Black Saint" and "Changing" lock into hypnotic grooves while Mascis hits everything in sight. "Rip Van Winkle" gallops, "Hand of Glory" broods, and Kurt Weisman's organ gives the closing "Isadora" a proper haunted-house glow. John Agnello produced and mixed it, and Greg Calbi mastered it at Sterling Sound.

The Thomas brothers, Kyle and Luke, painted the cover art themselves. Kyle went on to wider fame as King Tuff, which makes this album something of a family heirloom with the volume turned all the way up.

Also at Kops: more Witch on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Tee Pee (cat# TPE-065), a reissue of the 2006 album.