Catching Up With 2016: Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard 's "Y Proffwydd Dwyll"

This band's name is almost too over the the top for me to take them seriously, but you don't have to get more than half way into the first song before it is hard to deny them. Hailing from Wales these kids have only been at it for a couple of years making this their second album. The guitar sound is big and dense like sludge , but they have enough somber atmosphere to qualify as doom. The croon of the female vocals is not what you would think to pair with the music churning under their melodies.Jessica Bell's voice sets this band apart in a way that leaves the bulk of their more burly barking counterparts in the dust. "Gallego" finds the churning the massive mountains of fuzz in a more straight forward direction until the keyboards add another coating of weird to this one.

When Bell's vocals come back in the give the song more of a sense of movement as it pulses in more of a sludge direction. I can hear the ghosts of 90s metal haunting this, not nu-metal as it is much more tasteful, but has a similar sense of adventure that many metal bands found when grunge broke and it became ok to break the rules. The second half of the album finds them locking in on big riffs and riding them out with the keyboards having to do as much magick as they can.

The last song finds the density increasing. Not their boldest to hang on the chug, the vocals fly back in in to save the day in a manner than reminds me of something you might hear on a Devin Townsend might do. Overall this is one of the more memorable doom album's of the year, my only complaint is some of the long instrumental passages don't make use of their strength that lies in Bell's voice and some of the songs begin to sound the same in the way they drone together, but but overall their powerful and hypnotic sound is unique so I will give this album a 9.