I'm normally very dubious when it comes to female fronted Metal bands. This is not because I am some kind of bitter chauvinistic sexist, or a general hater of women, but rather because the current track record isn't exactly great. Sure, there are some fantastic examples of when it works like ARCH ENEMY, but examples like these are few and far between. More often than not it just ends up being another piss poor attempt at doing something like JACK OFF JILL or MY RUIN and as great as those bands can be in the right set and setting, they're not exactly the pinnacle of musical greatness.

So I got stuck in to WITCH CHARMER with a cautious mind, but the very fact that it was labelled as Doom/Stoner Metal intrigued me. It's not often you find a band playing this type of music with a female vocalist, in fact I don't think I can name any off the top of my head. I can quite easily say I have been pleasantly surprised by what I have heard and hopefully it signals a possible change in the male dominated realms of decent Rock/Metal.

They certainly live up to the Stoner/Doom ideologies, probably leaning much more on the Stoner side of things but that is not necessarily a bad thing. The album starts of with a crunchy guitar that rips into a seriously groovy set of riff-age before making way for the rest of the band. The vocals of front woman, Kate McKeown, work so well because they don't sound even the slightest bit like she is trying to be someone else. No embarrassing attempts at screaming and no ridiculously weak efforts to sound emotive. Nope, she just sounds soulful and by golly, by george, I think it fits this kind of music perfectly. Just like the magic that works for CLUTCH with their bluesy overtones, WITCH CHARMER has a distinctly Soul/Blues/Jazz sound going on with the vocal work. The addition of the other members of the band on the microphone adds a fantastic variation to each song and they all have that almost sexual grit to their tone.

There are only two things that hold this album back. Firstly, the musical side of things seems to run out of ideas a little and the songs begin to sound a little like each other by the end of the album. This is mainly due to the tempo/tone of the songs, the variation seems to stop at the vocals from each member of the band. Secondly, I am not really a fan of "...To Death (I'll Drink)", it sounds very much like a love/loss song and this is just me being a dick but I don't really dig that in my Metal (although I know many do so maybe they can enjoy the song for me).

Oh, and they have a secret track at the end of the album. Sweet Jesus, I love secret tracks, and this one is pretty good, a fair amount of odd samples and ambient atmosphere about it. I'm always a little disappointed if an album just kind of finishes at the end of the last song.

If you want to avoid getting balls deep in the sausage feast that is Metal then give WITCH CHARMER your attention, they have boobies and good music.<