Reviews list for Electric Wizard - Dopethrone (2000)

I was born on a farm in the conservative midwest. I am a school teacher by occupation. I do not drink or smoke. I am not a satanist. I fucking love Electric Wizard.

What's in it for a guy like me? Well, this is going to be news for some people, but Electric Wizard is in fact a musical group, and a damn good one at that. They make mind blowing heavy psychedelic music that sounds like some of the best of Black Sabbath and Pink Floyd put together with a splash of Coven, and 2006 Dopethrone is their Magnum Opus. In other words I like this music because it's just that damn good on it's sonic merits. 

I saw the Wizard live at Royal Oak Music Hall a few years back. It was like attending a cult meeting. I knew there was going to be every manner of "you're not supposed to do this, see this, or hear this" involved. It was fuckin'' excellent. They play with a backdrop that plays black and white b-movies, stuff with a lot of horror, cult, and a dash of pornography. It was the kind of sleeze you want in a live production from this band. They lived up to the "Heaviest Band in the Universe" slogan, and they were surprising very tight. 

Go see the Wizard. Enjoy it in any manner you see fit. I'm not judging, I just want you to make it to and from the concert safe so we can do it again sometime. Maybe Let me drive, we can take the truck. 

The album that fulfills all the hysterical paranoia of 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 and their hypocritical outrage must be like nectar to him.

Musically Dopethrone takes the template for stoner doom laid down by Sleep, slows it down then makes it exponentially heavier and lyrically more outrageous to produce the gold standard against which other stoner doom albums are measured. The tracks are all thick and miasmic like a smoke-saturated trip through a narcotically altered dreamscape, super-heavy jams that derive from some kind of psychedelic black hole where time is slowed, perceptions are altered and the music's thundering, hypnotic riffs take control, forcing the listener's head to nod, body to sway and mind to roam.

Electric Wizard are a band who revel in and glorify the partaking of narcotic substances, so are probably not for you if you subscribe to the straight edge, just say no philosophy of the morally superior. Personally it's been a long time since I was involved in any kind of drug scene, but a blast of Dopethrone is all it takes to relive those heady days of bongs, booze and b-movies. This album is a true counterculture classic and an album any stoner (or ex-stoner) metalhead should return to regularly for a required fix.

Drugs

I don't remember the initial reaction or acclaim for this record when it was originally released back in the year 2000. But oh boy, did I get familiar with it incredibly fast when I did discover it! Back when I was a blue blood in high school in the mid 2000s, I heard this album played religiously among my metal friends and all of our jam sessions were built around the Dopethrone framework. And, for a time, we had a ton of fun just getting really stoned, jamming out to Electric Wizard adjacent music, then smoking some more while the soothing sounds of Kyuss and Sleep engulfed us.

That was nearly fifteen years ago, and my opinions on musical quality have changed drastically, especially since I went to post-secondary school to learn from industry professionals. One of the things that I learned (perhaps counter-intuitively) was a memorable tune/hook or a musical idea/motif that would develop over a song/album's duration. Or, to put it in a different way, something that will grab your attention. As I learned that, my dependence on drugs as a gateway into different types of music became less dependent. And my love for Dopethrone deteriorated with it.

Don't get me wrong, I still do enjoy this album in certain situations. "Funeralopolis", "Barbarian" and "We Hate You" are shorter songs that don't overstay their welcome. And from a sonic perspective, this is the closest anyone has come in creating a hybrid of the slow, dirge-like tempos of Doom Metal and the intense crunchiness and aggression of Sludge Metal; a sound that has not been truly replicated since. However, the longer tracks ("Weird Tales / [et al.]", "I, the Witchfinder" and "Dopethrone") all have this incessant desire to just carry on without development. They stay very monotonous vocally and tonally, and they slow down even further, making them even more or a dirge than before.

For the purposes of this review, I re-listened to this album twice; once completely sober, the other after a few hits of the devils lettuce. And I found that my reaction in both scenarios were very similar. They were groovy as hell yes, but so much of this music was in one ear and out the other. I could feel myself falling in and out of consciousness as each new idea became indistinguishable from one another. While I was sober however, and actively hoping for something to latch onto, I found very little.

In the other scenario, it was a nice way to pass an hour plus without having to think about very much. And it was a brisk seventy-one minutes as well. So if I can recommend this, I would say listen to this album the way it was meant to be heard; in a haze of smoke. When sober, I put Dopethrone in the same category as I would include a lot of Deep House music; it works really well as part of a gaming/workout playlist, but that hardly constitutes a great album in my opinion.