Electric Wizard
Dopethrone
The Music Cartel/Rise Above
The recent “Writers Poll 2000” in Terrorizer said it best about Electric Wizard•s Dopethrone: “We gazed into their abyss. It’s a wonder we ever came back.” Truly, this writer’s still trying to draw himself away from Electric Wizard’s newest • and best, so far • abyss. Like a giant solar eclipse worming its way into view, Dopethrone (the trio’s fourth record thus far) is at once spellbinding and painful, awe-inspiring and dread inducing, life-affirming and suffocating. Stultifying yet somehow rife with forward motion, the album • if taken in small snippets • would suggest that movement was possible; after all, Electric Wizard undoubtedly cut their teeth on the frayed-end boogie-chug of Sabbath’s Vol. 4. Yet, where paralysis • and, paradoxically, hypnotic envelopment • begins is between notes, between the chords, between one cymbal crash and one more than a minute later, between what is feedback and what is a riff, all of it conspiring to hold you enraptured and enthralled while time passes, smothers, and covers you with the ash of minds and woofers blown. And whatever the hell guitarist Jus Oborn is gargling through the vocal mic, it matters not: The consequent static is essentially another layer upon what seems like millions of others, but subconsciously you know there•s pretty much just guitar, drums, bass, and “vocals.” Doubtless, the subconscious is where Dopethrone exists and justifiably belongs • the most enjoyably numbing platter o• earthquaked clatter next to Sleep’s Jerusalem.
The Music Cartel, P.O. Box 629, Port Washington, NY 11050, http://www.music-cartel.com
