Esben & The Witch – Wash the Sins Not Only the Face

Esben & The Witch’s name comes from an old Danish fairy tale, and their sound fits for dark evenings on lonely wooded paths....
Esben & The Witch : Wash the Sins Not Only the Face
7.6 Matador
2013 

Esben & The Witch : Wash the Sins Not Only the FaceEsben & The Witch’s name comes from an old Danish fairy tale, and their sound fits for dark evenings on lonely wooded paths – atmospherically fuzzy but with a Gothic haunt, somewhere between dark post-rock and tragic fuzz.  Full-length debut Violet Cries introduced the sound well, but sophomore release Wash the Sins Not Only the Face (title taken from a Greek palindromic phrase, “Nipson anomēmata mē monan opsin”, inscribed upon a holy water font outside the church of Hagia Sophia in Istanbul) brings some much-needed coherence.

Expansiveness can be rewarding but also dangerous – the further one stretches, the less connected everything feels.  On Wash the Sins, Esben & The Witch ground their sound, relatively speaking, in neo-Gothic tragedy.  Pieces like “Iceland Spar”, “Slow Wave”, and “When That Head Splits” feel like tragedies slowly unfolding, like winter coming, and all are helpless to stop it.  Not all the songs work as effectively, but the press to “Putting Down the Prey” makes it the most powerful.

Wash the Sins Not Only the Face is decidedly ‘mood music’, in that it sets and is set for a certain dark, waning evening, but it grows nicely on that veldt.

Esben and The Witch – Putting Down the Prey

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