Paralyzed is an ironic title for an album that's anything but sedentary and inert. Although the dirgey
Sabbath grind of
Witch's debut release is retained here, there's also a newfound amphetamine rush to this material, the band drawing more explicitly on some of its punk and hardcore roots. Speed is of the essence and, in contrast with the first album, just one track lasts for over five minutes. Short and sharp, "1000 MPH" and "Mutated" suggest a band gripped by white-line fever: furious riffing sets the pace, but the rhythm section's relentless, stripped-down drive is the engine of
Witch's attack, with drummer
J Mascis playing Philthy Animal Taylor to bassist Dave Sweetapple's Lemmy. Indeed,
Paralyzed mates metallic heft with punk's economy and tempo in a coupling that evokes the New Wave of British Heavy Metal. Nowhere is this louder and clearer than on the opener, "Eye," its pummeling charge and twin guitar lines channeling
Diamond Head and
Iron Maiden. Despite the revved-up assault, on several more expansive numbers
Witch reprises its trademark sludgy trippiness. "Old Trap Line" emphasizes the band's spacier tendencies, its fuzzed-out
Om-like bass anchoring a spiraling, mesmeric groove; elsewhere, the trudging "Sweet Sue" makes room for some of the melody squeezed out of the compressed, riffcentric tracks. However, the most memorable numbers bring together the two competing sides of
Witch's sonic character: "Gone," for instance, oscillates between zoned-out torpor and surging intensity, while the bad trip of "Psychotic Rock" moves from a "Vegetable Man"-style disoriented plod to a frenzied climax.
Witch might be something of a side project for its members, yet it bears none of the signs of ironic hipster-dabbling that often mark such ventures: not only does
Paralyzed attest to absolute fluency in the metal idiom, it shows a band prepared to experiment with and expand it. ~ Wilson Neate