Album Reviews

Review: Alabama Space Witch by Beastwood

Beastwood is a new band to me although they’ve been around for a few years now, the band recently submitted their latest upcoming album for review. This is one of those albums I regret not getting to right away. Why? Well it fucking rocks! This kick of heavy band’s I’ve been listening to lately, well Beastwood fits well into it. The band cites their influences as Lynyrd Skynyrd, Motorhead, Artimus Pyledriver, Down, Clutch, Pantera, Hank III, Crowbar, Corrosion of Conformity, and Black Sabbath. That’s a pretty hefty list there. Lots to live up to. Well it’s safe to say that after listening to Alabama Space Witch, those influences are pretty obvious. It has the aggressiveness of Down and Crowbar, the enthusiasm of Clutch, the drive of Motorhead, and tone and attitude of COC and Black Sabbath. Personally, when I hear them, I can’t help but think of a harder and more bad ass version of The Midnight Ghost Train (no disrespect to them of course).

The album opens with the most excellent and heavy as fuck “Galactic Bison” and doesn’t stop for a quite awhile. Once you get to the 11th song, “Man of Many Names,” it changes pace. Instead of the heavy and gruffy vocals and instrumentals, the song is a much slower and softer number featuring acoustic guitars. As the song progresses it gets faster and has more electric instruments. It’s more of a radio song. It has that feel to it. It does break up the flow of the album a bit as the following song, “Whiskey Woman” returns to the deep and heavy style as was throughout the album before it and onto the end.

Alabama Space Witch is fucking bad ass. Bottom line, this is a band you need to be following if you like any of the above mentioned influences. If heavy music that’s heavy enough to set off a few car alarms as you drive by while blasting it is your thing, this is for you. It is long. The album runs close to an hour in length. It’s a lot of heavy music to take in. Can you handle it?

As of this writing, the album artwork was still being finalized (thus no album artwork above) and the band was having some label interest so a release may be a little bit off but not to far off. Possibly late fall/winter. In the meantime you can hear a few tracks as well as material from their previous album, Sex Devil on their Facebook page.