September 2020 Feature Release - The Fallen Edition

It's now September which of course means that we'll be nominating a brand new monthly feature release for each clan. This essentially means that we're asking you to rate, review & discuss our chosen features for no other reason than because we enjoy the process & banter. We're really looking forward to hearing your thoughts on our chosen releases so don't be shy.

This month's feature release for The Fallen is 2000's classic  "Dopethrone" album from English stoner doom legends Electric Wizard, a release that saw the band not only capitalizing on the strong reputation they'd created off the back of 1997's "Come My Fanatics..." album but also one that created a new benchmark for the entire stoner metal subgenre. What do you guys think of it? Is there a better stoner metal record than this one?

https://metal.academy/releases/226

I wouldn't say that stoner metal is my favourite style of metal however I've always really enjoyed "Dopethrone". It's usually the groovier aspects of stoner metal that put me off a bit but "Dopethrone" combines that element with ridiculously extreme heaviness in order to draw me in & give me a good ol' fashioned rockin'.  It certainly helps that I've had my days with the weed too with the longer & more expansive tracks like " I, the Witchfinder" & "Weird Tales" hitting me hardest. I definitely prefer some of the Wizard's other releases over this one (particularly when they're directed at a more straight-down-the-line doom metal approach) but I'd be surprised if any fan of stoner/doom metal doesn't dig this release in a major way.

4/5

Well for this one let me break my normal review/forum character since we're talking about Dopethone. 

Dopethrone is sick. Even though I found that I really like Come My Fanatics... and their debut a lot, Dopethrone stands alone as one of those Stoner Metal albums that, in many ways, feels like the full Stoner Metal experience. It's slow, it's groovy, it's heavy, it's expansive, but it still has that edge that some Stoner Metal loses eventually. Honestly I should bump it up to a 5/5 since it's what I compare most high-ranking Stoner Metal releases with, but there's something about the genre that keeps me from really saying it's a masterpiece. Maybe it's the repetitiveness? The slowness? Eventually it gets boring? At the same time if I'm in the mood for some serious Stoner Metal, Dopethrone is a prime example of what I turn to. For me, you can't really have great Stoner Metal without the groove to get lost in, and this album has them in droves. Each extended track has massive instrumental sections that feel improv'd and just drone on and on without losing the initial groove, and Dopethrone is one of the only releases that I can really get lost in when it comes to the Stoner Metal genre. 

For me this is the gold standard for classic Stoner/Doom Metal. There are others that give their own spin on the genre, like Mammoth Weed Wizard Bastard, but sometimes you can't beat the traditional. Although there are some admittedly awkward moments in this album, it's immediately what I think of when it comes to an album drenched in Stoner vibes. 

4.5/5

Dopethrone is a tale of two albums for me. As a straight up piece of music, it really isn't that fantastic. The forms of the individual songs are very simplistic and repetitive. And with no sense of development in those themes, it leaves the songs memorable for sure, and they are groovy as hell, but they grow tiresome very quickly. For me, I prefer the albums shorter song forms like "Barbarian", "We Hate You" and "Funeralopolis" on occasion.

But as I outlined in my review, I think that the "Stoner" portion of the "Stoner Metal" tag is essential to really enjoying this album in the way that so many have highly regarded this album over the years, including myself for a time. Dimming the lights in my dorm room, getting high, and blasting Dopethrone was a hell of an experience, but it almost always turned into background noise, which in hindsight, is kind of disappointing.

I still occasionally return to individual songs from this record, but never in its entirety. I put Stoner Metal in the same designation as I do with Deep/Techno House while I'm playing video games; it's great music that fits the environment, but that does not always make for a great pure album listening experience.

6/10

This is the album that fulfills all the hysterical paranoia of late twentieth century parent's fears of drugs influencing their offspring's minds and causing them to turn to more drugs, sex, satanism, even more drugs and insanity - Reefer Madness brought to life. I'm sure it gives Jus Osborne a warm feeling inside to think what a record like this must do to the sensibilities of the so-called moral arbiters of the world as he feeds on their hypocritical outrage like some kind of mental vampire.
Musically it takes the original template for stoner doom laid down by Sleep, slows it down, makes it exponentially heavier and lyrically more outrageous to produce the standard against which other stoner doom albums are measured. Funeralopolis, Weird Tales, Dopethrone and I, The Witchfinder are the very epitome of what stoner metal is all about. It's been a long, long time since I last got stoned, but all I have to do is put on a pair of headphones, turn out the lights and crank this up to take me back there again.