White Witches is a duo of Rory Lewarne, former frontman of the sorely-missed 2000s Mute act Pink Grease, and Piranha Deathray guitarist / keyboard player Jeremy Allen. For their debut album they’ve added the miscellaneous talents of ex-Art Brut drummer Mikey Breyer, Bourgeois & Maurice bassist Charlie Webb, Desperate Journalist vocalist Jo Bevan, and All Seeing I’s JP Buckle. Some six years in the making, Hieronymus Anonymous was recorded with Buckle at Jarvis Cocker’s basement studio and Dean Street studios in Soho.

Lewarne and Allen both grew up streets apart on the westernmost edges of Cornwall and describe White Witches as “dirty glam rock with a dystopian heart and a Cornish spirit”. The music here is wiry, brazen and full of nervous energy, infused with reverential flashes of Ziggy, Bolan, Ferry and the brothers Mael. Itchy guitar, clever lyrics and energetic kitwork combine together here into an album treading a tightrope between opaque fun-filled songs and seriously ominous themes, all fronted by Lewarne’s instantly familiar histrionics.

The album contains a whole host of highlights, from the theatrical melodrama of ‘Estella’ to the swirling basswork and sinewy riffery of ‘Sandcastles’, wherein Lewarne adopts a crazy falsetto amid music operating on the very edge of chaos. The title track is a strident, pathos-laden ode to a life well lived, while towering closing track ‘Savages’ blends the now-familiar White Witches sound with an undercurrent of synths and a rousing chorus amid an album of rousing choruses.

The pair claim that the album was a product of growing up in a way that being in a band like Pink Grease didn’t allow, while in Allen’s case it also involved dealing with life-limiting alcoholism; in spite of what should be, on paper, a relatively mature album, HeironymusAnonymous is bratty, irreverent, original and punk as fuck.

Listen to Heironymus Anonymous here.

(c) 2018 Mat Smith / Documentary Evidence