Why You Need Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone

By Quotidian

“Once you get into one of these groups, there’s only a coupla ways you can get out. One, is death. The other, is mental institutions”.

So begins Dopethrone, Electric Wizard’s magnum opus.

This is, in my opinion, is so close to being a perfect album it doesn’t matter. The production is spot on, with layer upon layer of fuzzed-up guitar and tectonic bass riffs stalking around a landscape of rattling drums and sizzling cymbals. It sounds huge. It sounds, appropriately enough, like the rampage of a Lovecraftian monstrosity, called up from the darkness to feast on your pathetic souls. Somewhere in the middle, howling into the storm, are Jus Oborn’s vocals, anguished and full of spite.

Hyperbole aside, this album is incredibly consistent from beginning to end, and I mean that in every sense of the word. Songs often turn into extended jams, slow crushing passages that evoke scenes of otherworldly menace. An excellent example is Weird Tales, slowly dwindling into a pulsating background hum. The subject matter of the songs is either the complete hopelessness of human existence, or horror films and fiction, and you can tell the band took a LOT of drugs when they wrote this record.

The songs are mostly of epic length, yet never come close to bloated prog tedium. The songs are as long as they are because that’s how long the band felt like playing them for. Either you will hear this album and not be bored for one second of it, or turn it off after 30 seconds and go for shower because you feel a little bit icky.

Stand-out moments are the title track, the oppressive, plodding I, The Witchfinder, and the more -Sabbath-than-Sabbath Funeralopolis, but for me, the track that seared itself into my soul, the hook by which this beast constantly pulls me back into its slimy clutches, is We Hate You. To me, this track sums up the band at this point, perhaps foreshadowing the forces that drove this incarnation of the band apart, but certainly nailing down the disillusionment that brought them together in the first place.

I first got into the magical world of Doom through Candlemass (fantastic, but nothing like EW), and this was not the first Electric Wizard album I ever heard; that was Let Us Prey… a fine piece of work, that saw them experimenting with a more up-tempo sound, but it was this album that blew me away, that pulled me into the dark depths and showed me what was down there.

This album is pure evil, and I fucking love it.

by admin