Frankie and the Witch Fingers had put out plenty of material before their 2019 release, ZAM, but it might be fair to say that they were in a full sprint when they released it. The album is almost non-stop energy and bangers from beginning to end.
Starting with the trippy “Dracula Drug,” the album gets off to what you think is a heady, Nang Champa incense-sniffing start, but it soon bursts into a full-blown rock song with guitars that hit like axes through a piece of firewood. “Work” takes off like a funny car at a green light and never employs the parachute to slow down as the band sings about, you guessed it, work and who’s really the boss and who’s really the employee. “Realization” is a blast (especially live) with its driving beats and bass. It instantly gets your toes tapping, if not pogoing around your room, office, or the coffee shop where it happens to be playing. It drifts into a psychedelic mind-bender so you have time to take a sip of tea before “Pleasure” (“Everybody wants it. Everybody needs it.”) comes along with its killer bass line, synth-organ riffs, and bad-ass swagger.
The title track is over eight minutes of psych-rock jamming that almost overwhelms you. “Cobwebs” and “Dark Sorcerer,” apart from being good inspiration for Dungeons and Dragons campaigns, are fun tracks that combine psychedelia with garage rock. “Purple Velvet” could’ve been a Velvet Underground track in an alternate timeline, and the short “I Am” sounds a bit like swamp rock at first and then morphs into a desert rock gas pedal-stomper that makes a hard left and becomes “Underneath You.” It’s no accident, I think, that those two titles complete a sentence, and it’s no accident that “Underneath You” shifts that muscle car into fifth gear so it can race down a road partially covered in drifting sand dunes. The album ends with “Head Collector,” a straight-up psychedelic track that takes its time to languish in a warm sun alongside a stream.
ZAM is a great place to jump onto the Franke and the Witch Fingers train if you’re looking for a place to start. Listen to it loud.
Keep your mind open.
[Work your way over to the subscription box while you’re here.]
