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Review: 'WITCHING WAVES'
'Crystal Cafe'   

-  Label: 'Happy Happy Birthday To Me'
-  Genre: 'Indie' -  Release Date: '26th February 2016'-  Catalogue No: 'HHBTM 173'

Our Rating:
Witching Waves come straight out of Homerton on the edges of Hackney Wick and the marshes. They are sponsored by the American label Happy happy Birthday To Me, yet sound like in the old days they would have been on 96 Tapes.

The album opens with Twister: somewhere between a lo-fi Penetration and Blood and Roses with cool female vocals and a twister ruining football matches all over the marshes. Seeing Double, meanwhile, has fabulously insistent guitars like Hackney Five O for a new generation full of anger and spite as you see double as you look in that mirror.

Pitiless is like the Marine Girls being mangled at an all-night rave at Chats Palace and coming on like a distorted Blyth Power outtake. It has a really cool guitar break in it too. Red Light Loop starts with a simple guitar part that repeats for about a minute or so and that's that. It's like a short meditation.

Make it Up has cool girl/boy vocals. It's all very 96 Tapes meets the Daintees while wondering when the designer shops moved into Morning Lane. It's also apparently about a relationship falling to pieces. Anemone, however, sounds like it could be a Lee Ranaldo solo song with pulsing noises and a distinct air of foreboding. It's a good way to bring an end to side one.

Side two opens with The Threat, another Marine Girls meets Penetration style song that deals with surviving in a modern city that has changed beyond all recognition while the new buildings go up and you wonder why Hackney needs a Burberry shop on a road that wasn't safe to walk down just a few years earlier.

Red Light - this time un-looped - is more of a C86-type indie song with a pretty cool repeating motif as the singer's confusion unfolds as that Green Light turns to red and they try to get closer to the line. Receiver reminds me a lot of Desperate Journalist but with more distortion and odd sounds to move it along as they sound like they want to go and walk along the banks of the puny River Lea down by the old Matchbox toy factory.

Inoa starts off quiet with odd musical interjections as it builds and fades in places. It's like Bauhaus covering Brian Eno's Third Uncle. The album closes with Flowers, a gentle love song that seems to be hoping that Hackney Marshes have become a bucolic meadow and what is now the wild bit close to the Eastway covers the entire marshes rather than the football pitches I used to play on about 35 odd years ago.

This is a very cool album that makes me want to go and see Witching Waves play live. Find out more at Happy Happy Birthday To Me Records online

Witching Waves Bandcamp page
  author: simonovitch

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WITCHING WAVES - Crystal Cafe