Review by SilentScream213 for Sleep - Dopesmoker (2003)

Doom Metal is a mood-driven genre of Metal that focuses on moody atmospheres and negative emotions like melancholy, mourning, or even misanthropic hatred. At its brightest, bittersweet and longing. It uses slow, plodding tempos to help emphasize the funereal atmosphere, evoking the lethargy of depression, a funeral march, or a dying villain’s last hurrah. The heaviness embodies the crushing weight of despair, solitude and alienation. Every aspect of the genre is an ingredient in emphasizing the darkest of human emotion.

Drone Metal is a texture-driven genre of Metal that focuses on building atmosphere using extremely slow, drawn out, and usually repetitive guitars, with special emphasis on the textural aspects that can be achieved with the guitars . Rather than evoking mood or theme, the style typically opts to home in on creating a droning wall of fuzzy, hazy, bassy guitars that provide a sort of “white noise” with their textural assault. Drone Metal styles commonly employ simple instrumentation and repeat patterns for extended lengths of time, compositionally sharing similarities with traditional Drone and Noise music.

If one can understand this, one can come to the sensible conclusion that Dopesmoker, despite being labeled with the disastrous misnomer “Stoner Doom,” is NOT at all a Doom Metal record, but hybrid Stoner and Drone Metal record.

I’m a massive Doom Metal fan. This album lacks every single quality I find enjoyable in Doom Metal. So it’s either A) the worst Doom Metal record ever (incorrect) or B) not Doom Metal (correct).