When you don’t have a car in Los Angeles, you are almost like a handicapped person, right? No way! As long as I have legs I will use them and I decided to go to this free show at the Echo during this very-slow-show-week (it’s always like this between Christmas and NYE in Los Angeles) despite my lack of motor vehicle. I have to admit it, the Echo is not too far away from where I live and I am so used to the place that it was like a walk to my second home.
The LA Witch band was playing second that night, and I am very tempted to say that the trio of young girls put quite a spell on the crowd. With a name like this, they affirm a certain identity, they belong to the city and they sort of want to build their mythology, right? With a strong smell of incense, some dark reverb and a splash of surf guitars, the trio was rather static on stage, making the room vibrate with a raw, lugubrious but also familiar sound in the retro sense of the term. Yes they were dark, may be not the kind of cheering music you want to hear on the eve of new year’s eve, but really efficient with a sort of Joan-Jett-junior-badass (and sexy) attitude, especially coming from singer-guitarist Sade Sanchez. With her two bandmates, Irita Pai on bass and Ellie English on drums, they played a short set of songs with titles such as ‘You love nothing’, or ‘Get Lost’, and many of them had an abrasive almost metal-like bass line and a rather slow tempo, installing a menacing atmosphere haunted by echoing-lamenting Sanchez’s vocals lost in some bluesy psychedelia of the 60s.But they also played a few faster songs, in particular a new one that totally rocked the place, despite the girls being a bit hesitant before playing it.
Los Angeles Magazine has qualified their music of ‘Kim Deal influenced by Nirvana’, and I wish I could have come up with a formula like this one, although I heard neither of these bands’ sound during their set, to me, they looked like the Dum Dum Girls sounding like the Black Angels or the Brian Jonestown Massacre, but comparisons are never fair, and these girls are onto something. I bet that their music, that could pave dark alleys leading to deserted bars, is probably going to satisfy people beyond an usual Halloween soundtrack.
