Forever

The debut album by Witches is the kind of thing that is easy enough to enjoy while it's playing but not as strong in the memory as one might hope. A gentle chug of a rock album with nicely off-the-cuff vocals from Cara Satalino, it's pretty open about sounding like something from 20 years previously, part of the rough-edged but never too skew-whiff — or too grungy — feeling of so many bands of the time in the U.S. and elsewhere. Satalino's warm singing and occasional eye for good lyrical detail definitely count as strong points, but beyond that there's a sense of a band that knows what it's good at but isn't quite distinct at what it does yet. Forever may not last as long as the title, but it hits the tropes and sweetly scratches an itch from the get-go, and that might just be enough.