Electric Wizard - Dopethrone
Rise Above
September 25th, 2000.
Electric Wizard's sonic destroyer Dopethrone turns 25. The world was supposed to get Y2K'd, but it got Dopethrone'd instead. A story about a couch made completely out of dope influenced frontman Jus Oborn.
Engineered to move mountains, Dopethrone revels in: mind-wobbling sonics; Universe-bending feats; hair-raising reverberations; star-falling weight; gravity altering gristle. Holes in time. Blocks-upon-blocks thick. Housed in a grim past, present and future. Walled-in by a lack of inward, outward, anyward movement. Stuck in the self. Adrift of everything else. Sick of the sight of your being. Feeling ugly, dirty, downright vile. A heavy hazing of dust fills the air. Residue cakes your skin. Hatred dismantled down into minutes and seconds. Life has no meaning. Pain and suffering is all there is; all there ever will be. If there was a button to end it all, it would be slapped on sight. Not a second more of this shall pass by my tired eyes.
After watching some videos of the recording process of Dopethrone on YouTube(video linked below) one should wonder how the recording studio(glorified sound hut AKA Chuckalumba Studios, Dorset) was still standing after. How it didn't crumble into sticks and stones is one of the mysteries of my life to date. It couldn't have been any other way - the grit of the environment in which material is made is reflected back out of it on the other side. The New Forest National Park(where the recording studio is located) most definitely did not appreciate being belted with wave after wave of grizzling decibel tonnage. Dopethrone will make your vision vibrate and your follicles flutter.
On the H.P. Lovecraft influence in the albums lyrics, Oborn said: "I really got so many ideas from his stories. I'd sit there, out of my brain, reading his[Lovecraft's] stuff, and extrapolating on what he'd written." (Dome, 2024)
Tinnitus on tick; you'll pay for it later. The undead come undone. Akin to a nuclear annihilation, Dopethrone will strip, flatten, decimate all in its path. Squeezing the most rotten of fruit and suckling on the putrid juice. Coughing up a lung, or two. Re-arranging the contours of your brain. The pinnacle of sonic molasses, Dopethrone is as heavy as humanly possible. It's a bone-crushing capturing of pure, unadulterated hatred.
"You think you're civilised, but you will never understand." This mind is well out of reach. A reach you've never seen. A depth you've never felt. A pain you're yet to breathe, though you will.
"When you get into one of these groups there's only a couple of ways to get out: one is death, the other is mental institutions."
Legalise Drugs and Murder.
References:
Dome, M. (2024) ‘Did we do drugs in the studio? Of course. What could be better than three or four bongs before you start recording?’: how stoner-doom kings Electric Wizard made the classic Dopethrone album, louder. Louder. Available at: https://www.loudersound.com/features/electric-wizard-dopethrone-album-interview.
