After having released a couple of singles/EP’s, Atomic Witch releases their first full-length album with ‘Crypt Of Sleepless Malice’, graced in a horrendously nuclear sort of artwork. And after having heard the album a couple of time, I can only say that Atomic Witch symbolises the Redefining Darkness label, a somewhat unsteady mishmash of styles.
Basically, Atomic Witch is a bit of Subway sandwich gone wrong. Imagine you haven’t eaten for a while and enter a Subway restaurant and you can already start drooling over all those fresh and nice ingredients while waiting in line for your turn. Then, when it’s finally your turn, you can’t hold back. You order the biggest sandwich. Then you go for the toppings. You choose everything you like. The sauce? You just pick everything of that too.
The result? A sandwich that is too big and you can’t finish and with so many flavours mixed together that it all doesn’t really taste like anything anymore.
That is the case with Atomic Witch. They are mixing so many styles, ranging from Heavy Metal to Death Metal and from Thrash Metal to Black Metal, that it hardly makes any sense anymore. Vocally it goes from high pitched screaming (yet not very well done), traditional Doom vocals (not too great either) to those Martin van Drunen-like Death Metal growls. Musically it goes from fast to slower parts and back again.
Just to make sure, I am very much into creative musicianship and unorthodox song writing, but this is just a bit too much of a good thing. It is just hard to wrap your head around and basically leaves you wondering what is happening. If that was the initial aim of Atomic Witch, then they’ve succeeded, if they were aiming for a well-crafted, musical versatile album, then they missed their mark.
