Review by Sonny for Electric Wizard - Dopethrone (2000)

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.