Last week we covered Radiohead, a group who somehow incorporated dozens of influences into a single band. Today, we’re looking at a group who distilled the essence of a single influence, Black Sabbath, into a hyper-concentrate for their own band, Electric Wizard.
Electric Wizard is for people who think Sabbath’s riffs are too fast and have too many notes. (Wizard’s sludgy, drop tuned riffs are perfect for beginning guitarists who need an easy win.) They’re for people who find Ozzy Osbourne too comprehensible and upbeat. (Wizard literally named a song “We Hate You” because they thought the Prince of Darkness showered too much love on his audience.) They’re for people who thought the creation of the first four Sabbath records involved far too much sobriety. (Jus Oborn said he began each recording session with the Orange County speedball of coke and weed, while the other members stuck to the tried-and-true stoner band essentials, booze and weed.) They’re for people who found Iommi’s charming acoustic instrumentals, Ozzy’s ballads, and all songs featuring keyboards, strings, and synthesizers “gay.” (Wizard are only gay for electric guitars…and weed.) Electric Wizard is for people who wondered why every Sabbath song couldn’t be “Sweet Leaf.” They’re Black Sabbath’s bong resin. They’re its generation joint. They’re its dab.
Every metal band has Sabbath as an ancestor. Electric Wizard is the mewling, squalling, caterwauling offspring of Black Sabbath fucking itself. They are stoner metal personified.
And yet, on Dopethrone, our Heck Record of the week, Electric Wizard isn’t an inbred bastard with a row of superfluous nipples and a jutting Hapsburg jaw that won’t close all the way. They’re a magnificent albatross in flight.
I’ve listened to a lot of stoner metal albums – including a couple more from Electric Wizard – and none of them hit quite like Dopethrone. I think that’s because despite its simplicity, stoner metal is actually pretty hard to make well. It’s easy to be too simple, too stupid, too weird, too high. It takes a magical alchemy of darkness and light to make a stoner album great. You gotta hit a fuzzy sweet spot. If you play too slow, it’s doom metal, which has its adherents – and can reach spiritual places – but is not fun in the way of true stoner metal. Worse is if you play too fast. Then you’re stuck in a no man’s land of mid-tempo rock. Ugh. Metal has a dead zone between the tempos of Sabbath and Motörhead.
Others have released wonderful stoner albums. Kyuss’s Blues from the Red Sun, Pallbearer’s Foundation of Burden, and Winter’s Into Darkness, all of which either inspired or took inspiration from Dopethrone, and are eligible candidates for the best stoner albums of all time. But none have its purity.
Kyuss are a psychedelic band. They’re heavy and they rock, but their high desert weirdness is more mescaline and LSD than phat blunts, couches, and TV.
Pallbearer goes to the same sludgy places as Dopethrone, but won’t be contained there. Like most modern metal bands, they’re essentially an amalgamation of their favorite metal subgenres, and stoner metal is just the favorite of their favorites. Besides, their albums scare me a little too much for easy, blissed-out listening.
And then we have bands like Winter, Candlemass, Cathedral, and St. Vitus, all essential progenitors to what has become known as stoner metal. However, none of them sound as massive as Electric Wizard, whose music envelopes you like a huge bean bag chair.
More than anything, I think this has to do with their production. Nearly all stoner and doom albums made before 2000 sound thin compared to the albums that came after. And I think that’s because in the 1990s we learned what heavy music should actually sound like: fat, tight bass, creamy mids, and enough highs to add texture and definition. Early heavy albums sound hollow at one or the other end of the EQ sweep. (Besides, I’ll bet Korn and Slipknot selling gold records incentivized producers to figure out how to record heavy music.)
Dopethrone’s only true challenger to the stoner metal, ahem, throne is Sleep’s Dopesmoker. Honestly, top-to-bottom, it’s probably the better, more interesting album. But…it isn’t for daytime use. Dopesmoker is too heavy. You only put on Dopesmoker after you’ve settled in for the night. If you wake up to Dopesmoker, get help – or at least let sunlight touch your skin. The world is a wonderful, awful place.
Think of it like this: Dopesmoker is the indica to Dopethrone’s sativa.
Some bands are the children of many mothers and fathers. Talking Heads have as much Ramones in their DNA as Fela Kuti as Lou Reed as the Temptations. With Electric Wizard, it’s Sabbath all the way down. With Dopethrone, they made an album that rivals anything Sabbath did since 1975. Maybe having big ears is overrated.
