Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard: Noeth Ac Anoeth

Wrexham’s heaviest live up to their ludicrous name.

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Their name is so laudably preposterous that you’re compelled to love them even before hearing their music. But then with a name like that, this band were never going to be anything other than a wildly psychedelic doom metal band, were they?

The presence of singer and bassist Jessica Ball is the key to what sets them apart from the average Sabbathian dirge. Far from conforming to femi-doom cliché, her spectral soprano sits at the heart of the MWWB squall as an insidious extra layer, rather than a melodramatic focal point, and it’s all the more effective for it.

With three tracks clocking in at a bong-melting 50-minutes-plus, Noeth Ac Anoeth blearily surveys the midpoint between an Electric Wizard-style assault and knowingly cerebral drone evangelism, the hulking monotony of gargantuan closer Nachthexen working both as a gateway to altered states of consciousness and as an exercise in lobotomised riff worship. Plus, of course, who doesn’t want a T-shirt with that name written on it?

Dom Lawson
Writer

Dom Lawson has been writing for Metal Hammer and Prog for over 14 years and is extremely fond of heavy metal, progressive rock, coffee and snooker. He also contributes to The Guardian, Classic Rock, Bravewords and Blabbermouth and has previously written for Kerrang! magazine in the mid-2000s.