L.A. Witch: DOGGOD – Album Review

L.A. Witch

DOGGOD

(Suicide Squeeze)

LP | CD | DL

Released: 4^th April, 2025

L.A. Witch play a psychedelic, post-punk, drugged out drone blues that has become refined to scuzzy psych perfection on their third album.

Emerging from the Southern California underground in a mist of dry ice and kick-ass tunes, L.A. Witch released their eponymous album in 2017. They are the bastard offspring of an alternative California where Hope Sandoval took too many drugs, joined The Fuzztones then jumped ship to form an English early 80’s goth band. They create a psychedelic, post-punk, drugged out drone blues that has become refined to scuzzy psych perfection on third album DOGGOD.

The scene is set on album opener, Icicle, with its echoing vocals over a guitar fed through a flanger and backed by tribal drums. It’s a wistful, dreamy minimalist sound with gritty goth guitars. The vocals, as on many of the tracks, sound as though the vocalist is in another room, hearing the music in a dream; it creates an ethereal, sensuous tone.

There is more goth like sounds on Kiss Me Deep, with its dreamy, swirling sound, of longing and desire. It probes the longing of the heart and finds passion and despair. The music is akin to the swirling confusion that passion and desire bring. As in all great goth songs it is steeped in sensual longing and a surrender to fate. There is similar yearning over swirling guitars, with a very cool drum beat behind it on SOS. Sticking with that early 80s sound, I Hunt You Pray, is driven by a Cure bass line with a guitar that jangles down your spinal chord, bending like strung out tension whilst the drums beat out a sinister rhythm. The vocals echo from the grave, from a place we don’t want to be. A song for the forgotten and the abandoned.

The band haven’t forgotten how to punk it up in a garage style though. 777 opens with a heavy punk riff that drives on as the drums hammer out the beat and the bass drives relentlessly, pushing on, whilst the vocals hover on the edge of a void, drifting through the music like a ghost of love’s past. It’s a cool blend of driving punk and ethereal smoke and mirrors. Likewise, on The Lines the band rock out behind the vocals which shimmer and accuse. The vocals anchor the song as it threatens to accelerate away into chaos, whilst an organ adds something (un)holy to the mix.

The title song has a stripped back feel to the music, with the drums beating the backbeat into submission and the guitar and bass creating a classic rock groove. The lyrics are about submission: You like me best when I’m in distress.

Vocalist and guitarist Sade Sanchez says of DOGGOD: “I feel like I’m some sort of servant or slave to love. There’s a willingness to die for love in the process of serving it or suffering for it or in search of it… just in the way a loyal, devoted servant dog would. There is this symbolic connection between women and dogs that expresses women’s subordinate position in society. And anything that embodies such divine characteristics never deserved to be a word used as an insult.”

The album was recorded at Motorbass studios in Paris, and the city has clearly seeped into the pores of the band and the grooves of the record, with its gothic art and ghosts of the cafes and avenues. It plays as a soundtrack to draping oneself across Jim Morrison’s grave in Père-Lachaise.

L.A. Witch are Sade Sanchez (guitar/vocals), Irita Pai (bass), and Ellie English (drums), and they make damn fine music.

~

You can find L.A. Witch Instagram | X | Bandcamp | Spotify | Apple | Youtube.

All words by Mark Ray. More writing by Mark Ray can be found at his author archive. And he can be found on Instagram.