Orlando bands San Francisco Renaissance and Alien Witch release split album

Look at the straightforward title The San Francisco Renaissance & Alien Witch and you see a split record between notable Orlando bands The San Francisco Renaissance and Alien Witch. What you’ll hear when you listen to it, however, will sound eerily like a collection by a single entity. And there are reasons aplenty for that. Foremost, there’s some key overlap in personnel. Specifically, the bands’ respective principals — The SFR’s Parker Mabry and AW’s Dee Dee Crittenden — both play in each other’s band. To further the blur, the material, despite coming from two different entities, was played mostly by the same small core of Mabry, Crittenden and Alien Witch bassist Mauricio Reyes. Furthermore, they did it in isolation in the attic of a remote 120-year-old house in North Florida. 

From all that concentrated intersectionality and collaboration comes the distinctly unified result of The San Francisco Renaissance & Alien Witch. The eight-song album is evenly split, with the first four songs penned by the SFR and the last four by AW. 

The opening SFR side is immediate in both music and intent. This is psych-rock revivalism as direct and faithful as it gets, which is practically imperative if you’re going to call yourself The San Francisco Renaissance. What that lacks in innovation is amply replaced by the inspired flair of these songs. Beyond the impressive fidelity to psych tradition, what separates the SFR from other revivalists is the pop precision and concision of Mabry’s songwriting. Although they’re absolute voyages, none of the songs stretch beyond the three-minute range and all of them ring with melodies so brilliant that they often sound like The Stone Roses on acid.

Midway through, Alien Witch impose their usual dark aura and bring things down to a funeral march with “Get Out Alive.” Immediately after, they resume the blissed-out cruising altitude set by the SFR and keep the party up in the clouds.

There are some fine distinctions between the two halves of this work. But the minds, spirits and hands behind it are in such synchronicity that everything dovetails without effort or seam. The result is less a split record than a joint album. And it’s a sumptuous feast for true psych believers, one that takes traditional 1960s ethos and injects it with the modern diesel of bands like The Brian Jonestown Massacre and Warlocks. 

An odyssey that’s at once high and heavy, The San Francisco Renaissance & Alien Witch album is a rare gestalt that’s not simply a coupling but a convergence, a grand cosmic singularity. It’s the document of two Orlando luminaries becoming one force in pure communion with the psychedelic oversoul. The joint album now streams everywhere and suits atop TLU’s Spotify playlist.

You can catch Alien Witch live this weekend on an all-star local bill alongside Black Wick, Snotnoze Saleem and Los Jarritos (8 p.m. Friday, Oct. 3, The Falcon, no cover).

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This article appears in Oct. 1-7, 2025.