One hour. One song. This album had to happen someday and it was probably going to be made by a band whose members regularly smoked a metric shit ton of weed. Sleep’s Dopesmoker probably isn’t the most famous stoner/doom metal album. (That’s probably Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone.) And they didn’t originate the genre. (That would probably be either St. Vitus or Candlemass.) But it is probably most representative of the genre. It has molten riffs, drone, space/sci-fi lyrics, tube amp worship, a religious relationship to cannabis and Sabbath, down-tuned guitars, caveman drums, bass that is as prominent as the guitar, distortion over everything, and a very wobbly conception of time. Did you put on this album five minutes ago or five months ago? Hard to tell on Sleep time.
Metal fans are made, not born. Newbies often can’t handle the hyena squeals, cookie monster vocals, 210 BPM tempos, drums-falling-down-stairs breakdowns, time-signature leaps, or flat 1s and 5s that metalheads adore. (Not to mention the lyrics which catalog human weakness, societal rot, spiritual emptiness, sex, gore, drugs, and Satanism.) But, by starting gently, you can build yourself (or significant other!) into a metalhead. If you’re already in the can for hard rock, stoner/doom metal is a good onramp to prepare you for the harder stuff. The line from Hendrix and Cream to Sabbath to Sleep, Kyuss, Electric Wizard, YOB, Pallbearer, and Agalloch is a straight line – it just gets increasingly shaggy. The music is also surprisingly easy music to play. If you know the pentatonic scale, and own a distortion pedal and cell phone recorder to help you remember the shit you wrote while blazed outta your gourd, you can probably put together a decent doom/stoner metal band. The hardest part is finding two friends willing to play slower than a caterpillar on quaaludes with you.