Acid Tongue is a band that actively defies categorization. Their debut LP, Babies, released in 2017 as an energetic blend of styles ranging from gritty garage rock to vintage soul to far out psychedelia, each seemingly handpicked from a bygone era but markedly immediate and modern. Over the past couple weeks, the band has been micro-dosing the world with a slow drip of singles in preparation for the magnitude of a new, album-length trip and the third tab hits now.
“Follow The Witch” is a real son-of-a-bitch of a track. Kicking off with a fat riff so swampy your speakers will start to sweat and backed with a percussive stomp nothing short of hypnotizing, this is true electric blues. Acid Tongue tap directly into the grand tradition of bayou boogiemen like John Lee Hooker and Junior Kimbrough, but played at a pace fast enough to keep up with prohibition era Mississippi bootleggers outrunning the law in hot-rodded Fords. There’s a real menace here as Guy Keltner delivers lines like “bet you’ll be the first one here that dies/and no one’s gonna miss you” with a snarl that’s both a warning and a dare, building a narrative encouraging the listener to give themselves over to the infernal power of the music. True to their encyclopedic knowledge of music history, Acid Tongue punctuate the track with a series of sugary “ooh-ooh”’s lifted almost pitch-for-pitch from “Sympathy For The Devil,” invoking the Rolling Stones’ sympathetic Satan and all the irresistible power and destruction that follows in his wake.
Acid Tongue’s sophomore LP is set to cover a ton of sonic ground when Bullies drops on March 13th via Freakout Records so get ready for a wild ride. Follow Acid Tongue on Instagram and do not miss the chance to catch their legendary live show when they come to town.
