Bog Witch’s “Hatter’s Mad Emporium” isn’t a song as much as an odd, irresistible experience. From its first note, it pulls you under into a world where nothing is safe or still. The song pulses like the movement of passing through a warped carnival hall of mirrors inside the Mad Hatter’s store, populated by sly smiles and secret languages. Wendy DuMond, the creative force behind Bog Witch, has crafted a thing of exquisite mind-fuckery that hooks deep into your chest with one claw and twists with the other. Beneath the surface of the candy-colored psychedelia and off-kilter melodies, there’s an unsettling sense that something dangerous lurks below the surface.
The song is all the more potent for the way it braids this surrealist sensibility with a pointed critique of serious subjects. This isn’t a jaunt through Wonderland so much as a subversive deconstruction of how easily truth can be distorted and how women’s curiosity and desire for knowledge are considered dangerous or subversive. In drawing on childhood discomfort with the Wonderland landscape, DuMond inverts that alien world into something more primal and more symbolic. Her vocal glides over the track like smoke over an incense burn, woven together with ukulele, vocal synths, and an otherworldly ambience of shifting horn and sitar sounds that gives the song an ancient-yet-futuristic quality. Each element of the song’s instrumentation is twisted in its own way, coloring the track with an uncanny sense of beauty while also giving it a sense of movement, as if the song were shapeshifting into something else while you’re listening.
Production is tight but allows for moments of delightful surprise, while the video for the song brings the surrealist nightmare on. Streaked with vivid colors and psychedelic sequences, it’s perfectly matched to the song’s energy. There are shades of kindred spirits Kate Bush and The Dresden Dolls in what Bog Witch does, but “Hatter’s Mad Emporium” is a world of its own. It’s weird and unabashed and so, so clever—a tiny, intense, unforgettable world of its own.
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