ELECTRIC WIZARD - DOPETHRONE

Album: Dopethrone
Artist: Electric Wizard
Year: 2000
Nation: UK (Dorset, England)
Label: Rise Above (RISELP52)
Sounds like: Black Sabbath playing on strings made of lead at the bottom of the Marianas Trench. Oh right, and the Pacific ocean's made of bong water now.
Goes best with: '70s horror movies, misanthropy, weed
Highlights: "Funeralopolis," "We Hate You," "Dopethrone"
Recommended if you're a fan of: Black Sabbath, Eyehategod, Acid Bath, Sleep, Goatsnake
Get it: download | vinyl

If there's another album that can stand unquestioned next to the landmark first releases of the immortal Black Sabbath catalog, I have yet to hear it. Electric Wizard set the bar for the new millennium's doom and stoner metal bands, and those behind them can only hope to brush it for a mere millisecond with the edge of their fingertips while straining in vain to leap at its lofty heights. This masterpiece has become the de facto iconic album of the stoner/doom scene (and with an album cover like that, how could it not be?). While it claims influences from the manic death-blues of Acid Bath, the tortured bayou sludge of Eyehategod, and the perpetually smoked-out Sleep, no other album in the genre has yet equaled the mighty Dopethrone.

Electric Wizard started out as a fairly standard stoner metal three-piece in their early days. Their self-titled debut was mostly forgettable, with basic Sabbath worship riffs and goofy Cathedral-inspired lyrics about wizards riding dragons down from the sky and gifting unsuspecting stoners with wild rides upon said dragons into the cosmos - whether this is a metaphor for something far more illicit is up to the listener. But in between their first release and the fateful day when their second LP Come, My Fanatics... hit the shelves was where they first chugged down the "winning" cocktail of sexual frustration, long-term unemployment, and excessive drug abuse. This is where their flawless fusion of stoner and doom metal was born. Jus Oborn's guitars aurally pulverize the listener, alternating between massive detuned pillars of riffage and maddened caterwauling through depressive blues solos. Under this, the colossal rhythmic stomp of Tim Bagshaw and Mark Greening (bass and drums, respectively) set the languid pace, never moving faster than "plodding" but crushing all foolish enough to remain in their path. The production is nihilistic and oppressive enough, but the lyrics are where a true transformation from benign and careless stoners to brooding hate-filled basement-dwellers can be heard. Consider the priceless couplet: "I hope this fuckin' world fuckin' burns away/And I'd kill you all if I had my way. This was a whole new Wizard - louder, angrier, and more in tune with the true darkness of metal, but it would take three more years until they reached their peak with Dopethrone.

As the blues taught us all so many years ago, the best music is always born from pain and anguish, and Dopethrone is no exception. The three years in between the two releases were a trying time for the band. Jus Oborn not only severed his fingertip in a DIY accident, but also suffered a collapsed eardrum during a concert, while Mark Greening broke his collarbone while motorcycling. To make matters worse, all three members had altercations with the law and were arrested - Bagshaw for robbery, Greening for assaulting a police officer, and Oborn for (wait for it) cannabis possession. On top of all this, they were spending all their time in the back-end of rural England with no way out. If you're into metal, it takes a surprising amount of effort to live in a place where the elderly relocate to wait out their final years. I've heard Dorset described as a trip back in time to when England was far less socially liberal. From secondhand accounts, the inhabitants are mostly conservative farmers and retirees with Victorian-at-best and Medieval-at-worst views on how the world should be run. Dorset is a place where there's little else to be found but empty green fields, ancient farmhouses, and churches on every street corner. And to top it all off, a population primarily consisting of the elderly means that it's really hard to get laid. If you're a heavy metal misfit and convicted criminal in a town where your closest neighbors are fanatical Christian geriatrics who are almost Southern Baptist in their zealotry, what else can you do but hide in your basement, watch old cult horror movies, and smoke as much weed as you possibly can to blow off sexual frustration and offset your intense and brooding hatred for the world around you? Why else would the band put the extolment to "LEGALISE DRUGS AND MURDER" in the liner notes? I'm just thankful they learned to take out all their anger on their instruments instead of other people, mostly because it gave rise to the greatest metal release of the last decade. Yeah, I said it.

To put it simply, Dopethrone obliterates. The sound is similar to Come, My Fanatics... in every sense of playing style, but everything in the mix is heavier and even more crushing, with ample doses of fuzzy analog distortion. The sounds on this album are glimpsed through a thick haze of smoke clouds, with rounded edges and extreme heaviness - if you're not high already, you'll feel like you are. Greening's drums take titanic strides across desolate wastes, Bagshaw's bass lays down a bedrock foundation with a low-end fuzz unequaled in any record since, and Oborn's guitars paint bleak landscapes of riffage across the skies while his vocals cry out from the wilderness, like some tormented victim of the Elder Gods of Lovecraft. The short "Vinum Sabbathi" kicks you in the face straight off and sets the slow, head-nodding pace, only to be immediately eclipsed by the mammoth "Funeralopolis" in an expert one-two punch. The second track lays claim to the heaviest riffs played since Black Sabbath's metal landmark Master of Reality, with a lyrical continuation of the previous releases' misanthropic themes. The song picks up to breakneck speed and is barely sustained there while Oborn repeatedly screams a fan-favorite chorus: "Nuclear warheads ready to strike/This world is so fucked, let's end it tonight!" The horror continues into the three-part Lovecraftian nightmare suite of "Weird Tales," where the limping dirge gives way to an oppressively mesmerizing and unbelievably heavy synth texture, which continues into the awesome "Barbarian" - an ode to Conan, beloved for years by lithe and meek-mannered nerds the world over with power fantasies of crushing their enemies, seeing them driven before their might, and hearing the lamentations of their women - "You think you're civilized, but you'll never understand." "We Hate You" is one of the band's anthemic spite-filled classics, mixing in imagery (and film samples) from The Dunwich Horror with riffs and lyrics born of pure, unfiltered hostility ("I'll take my father's gun and walk out to the street/I'll have my vengeance now with everyone I meet, yeah!"), but it's hardly the scariest song on the album. That honor goes to "I, The Witchfinder." This terrifying ten-minute monstrosity ramps up the tension, with the song comprising a mere two riffs and lyrics written from the perspective of an inquisitor of the Church. Remember, these were men with the unchallenged power to take any woman they wanted into their custody and do whatever they wished to them, in God's name. The song's tension slithers and coils at every turn, with sexual frustration and deviant fantasies running rampant. Sandwiched between the two lies the short instrumental interlude "The Hills Have Eyes," which lasts less than a minute. "We could just have a spacy jam session if we wanted to," they seem to say, "but what's the point?" The titanic closing title track is the perfect capstone to an already-perfect release, a glorious stoned-out anthemic ode to that most wonderful of smokeable substances. "Vision through THC/Three wizards crowned with weed/Feedback will set you free."

This record came to define the genres of stoner, sludge, doom, drone, and countless other "slow" metal acts for this millennium. Not only is Dopethrone the crowning achievement of stoner metal thus far, it's also an excellent example of how heavy metal lyrics are used as masks for something far more personal to the singer. What, you think we actually sing that passionately about dragons all the time? "Funeralopolis" is more about pessimistic misanthropy than the tomb worlds of the grim and dark future of the 41st millennium, "We Hate You" and "Barbarian" are barely-veiled expressions of the Wizard's repressed desires to slaughter everyone who looks at them funny, and "I, The Witchfinder" is more of an indulgence in sadistic objectification fantasies than historical tales of Matthew Hopkins, Witch-Finder Generall. There's far more going on in this release than is immediately apparent. It's an unmistakable product of pent-up frustration and anguish at the entire world, bottled up for three years of pain and finally unleashed upon the globe in a fuzzed-out, THC-addled claim to the crown of Black Sabbath themselves. Now that the dust has settled eleven years later, it's pretty clear that they've earned it.

BUY OR DIE.
<3 sam