The Warlocks
Time isn’t constant or concrete. It’s made of color and shade. Time flows, blurs and fades away in dim morning light. Time melts. And The Warlocks are the ecstatic, hazy, foreboding, holy tick tock of time that isn’t anything at all.
For five albums, The Warlocks have lived in between and beyond minutes and hours. Sway to The Warlocks live and loud and songs will drift and envelop each other like fog. Listen to the records and you’ll hear soundtracks to fuzz-freaked, bacchanalian stomps, pre-dawn city prowls, sleeping late with new crushes, and the elation and exhaustion that wash in and recede deep in the wee hours.
The Warlocks’ new LP ‘The Mirror Explodes’ speaks and whispers from all of these places. But where the band’s last long player, ‘Heavy Deavy Skull Lover’, tweaked time in a icy-cool, white-noise swirl that evoked a decadent lysergic night, ‘The Mirror Explodes’ is disorientation through a longer lens —pictures of luck, longing, losing, moods and fever dreams scrambled in the haze of near and distant memory.
On the 8 songs of ‘The Mirror Explodes’, the band’s signature amalgam of White Light/White Heat attack; space panoramas, fuzz, melancholy, and melody is present and potent. But there is vivid focus too. Throbbing bass lines, distant rolling thunder drums, and zombie rattlesnake shake are a heartbeat of strange, ominous vitality. Guitars howl, slash and bounce like light. Bobby Hecksher’s vocals sound oddly alone and unsettlingly intimate all at once. And just when you think you understand the sum of these sonic elements, they become something else entirely…
Tracklisting:
1. Red Camera
2. The Midnight Sun
3. Slowly Disappearing
4. There is a Formula to Your Despair
5. Standing Between the Lovers of Hell
6. You Make Me Wait
7. Frequency Meltdownh
8. Static Eyes