The Witch

Before most of the garage rock canon existed, this song was already its bruised and menacing ancestor. The saxophone doesn't ornament the track — it dominates, pushing through the mix with a tone that sits somewhere between a carnival and a nightmare, raw and reedy in a way that calls to mind dimly lit spaces and bad decisions. The tempo is deliberate, almost processional, which makes the aggression feel less like an outburst and more like an inevitability closing in. Roslie's voice has a howling, preacher-on-the-wrong-side-of-midnight quality here, and the subject — a woman cast as supernatural threat, dangerous and irresistible — lands with genuine menace rather than the campy horror of lesser rock novelties. The production sounds recorded in a room rather than a studio, and not a large room. There's a claustrophobic intimacy to it, the sound of musicians playing like they're trying to scare themselves. This was a regional single in 1964, barely heard outside Washington state at the time, and yet it pointed forward with uncanny accuracy toward everything punk and post-punk would discover ten years later. The Wire and the Cramps both heard this song's DNA somewhere in themselves. You reach for it late at night when you want music with genuine darkness in it — not the theatrical darkness of performance, but something that sounds like it actually believes in what it's doing.