House Of Mirrors is All Them Witches’ seventh album, their first in six years, sounding like it was given all the time it needed. An album built on patience that’s heavy in theme rather than sheer volume, rooted in a tradition that stretches back to the earliest American blues.

The opener Red Rocking Chair is an Appalachian folk tune, arranged into a six and a half-minute slow-burning piece that carries the grave quality of Nick Cave and Mark Lanegan, establishing a tone of patience and seriousness that runs through everything that follows, and the best way to describe House Of Mirrors is as a desert blues album that would absolutely destroy a metal festival, not just by blasting the audience with noise, but by rewarding them with something far more interesting and demanding. The heaviness comes through swampy groove and hypnotic repetition, with The Doors and the Grateful Dead alongside doom metal and stoner rock in the DNA. Allan Van Cleave’s deep organ is absolutely central to the warm sound, and the guitars, both electric and acoustic, are beautiful throughout. Culling Line is a slow, sparse piece that recalls Queens of the Stone Age in a contemplative mode rooted in southern blues, and Hold Up, Say What? is a massive crunchy headbanger that’s tremendous fun. Go-getter is sparse and filmic, sounding like the soundtrack to a tense moment in an HBO western. Starting Line builds its tension through a call and response between the vocal and the guitar riff, and Saturn Song closes the album with a spacey, evocative jam. It’s difficult to pin down why House Of Mirrors feels so at home in a metal context when it’s clearly a blues album, and the answer is probably that it shares the same qualities that Black Sabbath had: patience, weight, craft, and commitment.