They might have one of the most bonkers names in the game, but MWWB know how to make a seriously stonery racket. Their debut album Noeth Ac Anoeth is just three tracks long but clocks in at almost 50-minutes with the final track at half an hour in length. Oh yes.
But what does it all mean? Well allow guitarist Paul Michael Davies to give you the low down on the numbing your ears are in for.
**Les Paradise Artificiel
**“The title of this song is from a book by French author Baudelaire. Baudelaire offered the idea that there are two types of dreams: dreams that are connected to individual memory and dreams that have no connection to memory, experience or the character of the dreamer. These dreams where often achieved by ingesting hashish, opium and wine. The whole book just seemed a cool thing to have a song about. When writing the lyrics Jess took the basic concepts from the book and gave them a personal angle about how humans are much more insignificant than we think and that if the universe doesn’t end then we don’t actually exist. She meditates that humans tend to get wrapped up their own problems and often forget we are a minuscule spec in something we can’t begin to comprehend. We try to generate an ‘artificial paradise’ for ourselves. As we tend to write mad long stuff I wanted Les Paradise to have some kind of classic ‘song’ structure – be it verse, chorus etc. I came up with a big, lumbering riff with off-time changes and just let Jess’s vocals swim between the notes. I wanted the chorus to have a slightly sinister build and Jess’s bleak vocals help this I think. We wanted a break with some kind of weird, analogue synth then we come back in with a banquet of phat riffs. I think we may have accomplished this.”
**Slave Moon
**“This is a difficult one to talk about. The main riff came to me in a dream once and we just used to play this riff over and over at band rehearsal – it’s probably my favourite riff. It’s simple but I like it – it just sounded like a planet in orbit to me. I can’t even say whats it’s influenced by because I dreamt it! With this riff we wanted to make a proggy weird track out of it, it wouldn’t have suited a verse-chorus thing. We wanted a key change and our other guitarist (Wes Leon) came up with this insane riff. So we added some weird fifth notes to it and we just went for it. In the studio Wes started playing different octaves of the same riff and it just sounded weird – good weird. The original outro was long, like five minutes of the same riff. Our producer (Chris Fielding) said it was that hypnotic that his brain was actually changing it in his own head and he thought there were changes – that’s a great compliment coming from such an amazing producer and a member of Conan! To me, it’s probably our least accessible song but people do seem to like it a lot… maybe I have heard it too many times!”
Nachthexen
“Now this is the reason we formed MWWB, up until this year we were all in other bands. Wes and I wanted to do a long track – I mean long. James (drummer) is a big fan of sleep so when the idea came up after a soundcheck with one of our previous bands it was a no brainer. We then saw Jess in her old band playing in a barn on a mountain and we were like ‘Jesus… The circle is complete. James ask her nicely if she wants to be in a doom prog band’. Thats how we formed. Long songs have been done before but we wanted to make it a bit interesting. We wanted to have cool changes and builds so it’s like an organic piece. Wes always likes the light and dark aspects of a lot of doom stuff so with that we set to work on it. We wanted to start it off low key and sinister then just go on a heavy as hell riff journey into darkness. We wanted it to have some respite then ending with Wes’s shimmery, clean guitar and angelic vocal melody then…. well the listener can find out.
“The concept is about being somewhat of a prisoner in one’s own mind and body – the whole track is kind of a journey through inner space. Symphonie Fantastique by Berlioz was a massive influence on us. Hopefully the listener can use their imagination to enjoy the track, there are specific elements to the track that mean certain things but I like the idea of the listener coming up with their own imagery and interpretation for it. One aspect I will reveal is the title refers to abstract winged entities we called Nachthexen. These oversee the dark areas of the mind, they are kinda like the ‘masters of the outer darkness’ referred to in the book The Way Of The Shaman by Michael Harner. To us we wanted to take the concept of the South American shaman and give it a Northern European feel or something closer to home. The name is actually the nickname German soldiers gave to the female Russian pilots in WW2 so that’s even cooler. Put this on your turntable, turn your system up, put your headphones on and relax. See you in the outer darkness.”
Noeth Ac Anoeth is out 4 December.
