Album Review: Words Are Spells, Thoughts Are Magic by Witch Prophet
Witch Prophet’s fourth album turns brain tumor recovery into plain-spoken demands—for protection, for boundaries, and for the right to want.
Etmet Musa spent a decade telling doctors something was wrong. She had been having seizures since childhood, but the diagnosis of temporal lobe epilepsy didn’t come until around 2013, and even then, she fought to be taken seriously as a Black queer woman inside Canada’s medical system. Her third record, Gateway Experience, named after a declassified CIA report on sound-wave manipulation, traced her symptoms in real time. Focal aware seizures, déjà vu, waking nightmares. A few months after it dropped, she was diagnosed with a brain tumor. She had surgery. In the hospital, before they put her under, she repeated the Amharic word “Temesgen”—“Thank God”—to herself. Words Are Spells, Thoughts Are Magic, her fourth outing as Witch Prophet, is what she wrote once the crisis passed. The question the album keeps asking is blunt. Who deserves to be around her, and on whose terms.
Her aunts Elsa Tesfay and Selam Tesfaye open the title track talking over each other about Amitabh Bachchan and Madhuri Dixit, a mid-conversation family recording that could have been a voice memo left running in someone’s kitchen. Then the aunts translate an Ethiopian protection prayer, and one of them won’t say “hell,” so the other shouts it. The song that follows delivers exactly what the prayer promised: “I got a blessing for me and a curse for you/If you do me wrong, watch your back.” On “Akisté,” four of Leilani’s aunts (Saba, Helen, Selam, and Sarah Tesfaye) sing a graduation song they recorded for her son at a surprise party. Ethiopian and Eritrean graduation celebrations match weddings in their scale, and the song the aunts perform praises Musa as the mother. Underneath that recording, she sings “I’ve come a long way/With the odds stacked against me/Struggle every day.” It’s the warmest moment on the album. The pride is also her family’s, aimed squarely back at her.
Side A is self-produced by Musa, and it stays close-quartered. The drums are spare, the arrangements stripped, and her voice presses right against the beat without much air between them. “Temesgen” loops “I’m locked in this cage” over a thinned-out rhythm and Feven Kidane’s trumpet. The trumpet doesn’t soften the confinement; it just fills the same room. Then “Breathe,” co-produced with SUN SUN, lets in a little more space. “Constant thinking, constant fretting, second guessing/Am I good enough?/Is this good enough?/Just breathing.” Musa states it flat, and the third verse returns to those same phrases, and the outro lands on six words that carry more weight than they should.
“‘Cause in a flash we’re gone.”
SUN SUN takes production duties on Side B, and the shift is audible within seconds. Izzy Collins’ guitar and Tara Kannangara’s trumpet widen the scope on “Thoughts Are Magic,” “Secret Garden,” and “Forwards Backwards,” adding a warmth that Side A’s clipped arrangements held back. “Thoughts Are Magic” rides a mid-tempo groove between trip-hop and neo-soul. The refrain, “words are spells and thoughts are magic/do the work, it’s automatic,” could scan as self-help platitude if Musa didn’t keep hammering the second half. In an interview with RANGE, she said she doesn’t believe words and thoughts alone bring about dreams, and the song holds her to it: “Push aside the ego and find who you be with the spirit as your guide.” Side A is someone talking to herself in a hospital room. Side B is what it sounds like when she walks out the front door.
“Golden” is the most clipped song on the record, a quick dismissal of someone pumping fear into the air around her. “I jump dimensions in a blink of sunshine/Call it the Midas touch/I’m golden.” She identifies the manipulation, names herself untouched by it, and leaves. “Free” goes further. “I need freedom from you/From your lies/From your misery/From your vibe/You’re no friend for me.” No preamble, no second chance, no parting kindness. “Secret Garden” is the fullest of the three. “Welcome to my garden/I know all of those who follow will leave/But if you are not ready, don’t walk up/Don’t enter ‘cause I value my peace/So you can’t grab a piece/My mind, my body, my soul, my time.” Where the first two slam shut, “Secret Garden” posts visiting hours. The second verse, “dreams showing and telling me to be careful of who I trust,” fits a woman who spent years being gaslit by medical professionals about what was happening inside her own skull.
The most exposed song on the record is “Forwards Backwards.” “Is it true they’re telling me I need to repent my sin of loving a girl who loves me too?/They’re telling me I need to repent my sin of having a child before the groom.” Musa reports what someone said and answers, four times: “That’s not true/I don’t believe you.” The cyclical questioning around those verses, “Where do we go in the end?/Is this the end?/Does it even end?,” does something specific. It puts the feeling of hearing the same condemnation on a loop, and pushing past it each time, directly into the song’s structure. Collins’ guitar and Kannangara’s trumpet give it an unhurried pulse that lets the confrontation breathe without tipping into melodrama. “Love Shock/In Love” picks up where that defiance leaves off and turns into want. “Touch me teasing, feel me all over my body/Make me feel like I’m your one and only.” After all the protection and boundary-setting, the desire is the payoff. All that guarding preserved the capacity to want someone without bracing for the cost.
The 27 minutes hold together. Musa and SUN SUN gave this effort a shape—the self-produced interiority of Side A opening into Side B’s fuller arrangements—and the specificity of the strongest songs earns the directness of the feeble ones. Musa’s voice, a low, settled alto that gives every syllable the same even conviction, papers over those flat stretches. The split between her production and SUN SUN’s is the smartest decision on the record. It gives an album about recovery an actual arc—constriction, then release—without ever announcing it. She came through surgery, came through a decade of dismissal, and wrote these songs that say what they mean and quit.
Great (★★★★☆)
Favorite Track(s): “Words Are Spells,” “Forwards Backwards,” “Temesgen”