Witch Hats, Interview with Kris Buscombe

Witch Hats, Interview with Kris Buscombe
Interview Conducted Summer 2010
by Nick Schwab


These wicked witches will burn down Oz, blitzkrieg Wonderland, and will turn your happy thoughts aflame. They will also put a smile on your face.

The feverish, discordant Witch Hats are an Aussie band that will cause delirium followed by insomnia. Their music, akin to opium, will first go down harshly, as if chased with whiskey, but ingestion will get you gleefully grinning from their caustic and morbid humor.

Stark and corrosive, if lucid and intricate, the sounds in their latest album, Solarium Down The Causeway, will pull you into their tales of wicked embrace. The entire time one will tap your heels together saying, "There may be no place like home... but why not stay in Oz forever?"

Despite what seems like an ominous, dark, and even cathartic expulsion of demons from the music these lads create, there is a healthy dose of humor too, says Buscombe.

"I think they're really funny most of the time," he explains. "Absurdist humor gets me up in the morning and keeps me from going to sleep at night."

This is actually true. As at first they sound both scary and chaotic, there lyrics are often hilarious, while the instruments have an organization even if they are chaotic in structure. Take the third song on the album, Pleasure Syndrome, with Buscombe's gothic, venomous yell sinking into the music that oddly feels messy if uniform and systematic, as well as dense, albeit sporadic and contingent.

-Read the full story at UnRatedMagazine.com