Retro Review: Electric Wizard ‘Dopethrone’ – 25th Anniversary
I can still remember hearing Electric Wizard’s monolithic masterpiece Dopethrone for the first time. It was Seattle, Washington, in the fall of 2000, as the weather was transforming into the endless, wet, grey days of winter, and an old friend of mine, who almost single-handedly shook me out of my garage rock and punk obsessions of the mid ‘90s by turning me onto a deluge of heavy, riff-oriented bands once I had expressed my love for Black Sabbath.
He could not stop talking about this doom trio from Dorset, UK called Electric Wizard, and how unbelievably heavy their new album Dopethrone was. I was familiar enough with the band, and on my friend’s enthusiastic recommendation, I quickly purchased the CD off the much-missed, long-defunct All That’s Heavy webstore on the equally much‑missed stonerrock.com.
By this point, I was onboard with a lot of the underground heavy music percolating in the late ‘90s and early ‘00s, but I was unprepared for just how jarring Electric Wizard’s sound was to my ears at the time, as at that point, Kyuss, Melvins, Sleep and EyeHateGod were in the upper echelons of my personal ‘heavy’ of the time, but Electric Wizard were an entirely different beast.
The sound was all at once Herculean, distorted, fucked-up, harrowing, crushing, fatalistic and impossibly heavy. It was, at the time, the very epitome of what was considered stoner rock. At the same time, it blasted the existing doom metal genre into an interstellar vortex of Sabbath‑worship, weed smoke, bong hits, ‘70s burnout culture, Conan the Barbarian pulp, Hammer horror flicks, and occultism intertwined with LaVeyan Satanism. All of this was then enveloped in literal walls of devastating, fuzz‑drenched riffage and feedback, piled as high as the most imposing medieval castle.
This was bleak, hostile music, weaponized riffage, aimed at the human race, or at minimum, the small legion of riff worshipers, around the world who were looking for something different, something heavier, and found themselves gravitating to this version of heavy music. It was not for the faint of heart.
The seeds for the band that eventually became Electric Wizard were sown way back in 1988, when founder, guitarist, vocalist, and mastermind Jus Oborn formed Lord Of Putrefaction, putting out three demo tapes, which succeeded in giving the band some traction in the UK underground tape-trading scene, before changing their name to Thy Grief Eternal and then Eternal, while also recording a few more demos. Before long Oborn, bassist Tim Bagshaw and drummer Mark Greening coalesced as a trio and once again changed their name. First to Doom Chapter, then soon after, they combined two Black Sabbath songs – Electric Funeral and The Wizard – to create Electric Wizard. This solidified what is now considered the band’s classic lineup as they emerged out of their Sabbath-worshiping portal in a cloud of smoke.
Soon enough, Lee Dorrian, legendary frontman of BOTH Napalm Death and Cathedral, as well as the owner and founder of iconic UK label Rise Above Records, came calling. They released the band’s debut album, Electric Wizard, in 1995, to a positive reception in the doom circles of the time, but it was the second album, ’97s Come My Fanatics, where the band began to stand out from the lumbering doom hordes. It incorporated a chaotic, cosmic weight with elements from the then still relatively nascent sludge metal scene, a sprinkling of traditional metal, and a dose of bad attitude to much universal applause.
According to Oborn, after dropping off the map for a spell post-Come My Fanatics, Dorrian began to apply some pressure to get them into the studio. As the story goes, the members of Electric Wizard were in a particularly hostile and antisocial mindset around this period, with all three members running afoul of the law and Greening breaking his collarbone in a motorcycle accident. Add to which, the band’s legendary drug and alcohol consumption had reached its zenith, and it’s under these circumstances that they entered the studio. Armed with three songs ready to record – Funeralopolis, We Hate You, and the title track, Dopethrone – with the remaining tracks coming to fruition through studio jam sessions coupled with a haze of weed smoke and ill intentions.
The end result, Dopethrone, was released to an unsuspecting world on September 25th, 2000, with Electric Wizard instantly announcing their mission statement with a sample from the American news show 20/20 – ‘When you get into one of these groups, there’s only a couple of ways you can get out. One is death, the other is mental institutions’ – which aired during the height of the ‘80s ‘Satanic Panic’ era. And with that, Bagshaw and Greening’s universe-destroying, bass and drum rumble announces the coming of one of the heaviest album openers in the history of rock music in Vinium Sabbathi.
By the time Oborn’s unearthly distorted guitar enters the consciousness, Electric Wizard effectively declare there will be absolutely no fucking around as they proceed to utterly pummel their listeners into mush with the sheer mass of their sound. A hellish mix of the nastiest, heaviest guitar tone on earth, with unruly, chest-rattling, bone-crushing rhythms that sound like they were coughed up out of Satan’s lungs after a massive bong hit and exhaled like a black cloud into this fucked up world.
Oh, but we are just getting started, loyal Shaman readers, as the battered‑into‑my‑brain‑for‑the‑last‑25‑years riff of the incomprehensible Funerapolis unfurls into awareness. It’s accompanied by Greening’s behind‑the‑beat swing and a distorted cacophony of coughs and bong hits – undoubtedly from the trio mowing down fields of green during the recording sessions – before the band finally lock in together. To this day, the result stands as one of the heaviest and most utterly crushing songs ever pressed to wax.
Dopethrone, a quarter century later, remains a cornerstone and a pillar of both stoner rock and doom metal…
Oborn’s riff in Funerapolis is so archetypal that at this point, it should be fried into every stoner rock and doom metal fan’s DNA. It is that symbolic, and at this point, if one follows any stoner rock or doom metal page on social media, they’ve no doubt heard this celebrated riff, constantly playing on memes and reels, as it is among the best the genre has ever put forth.
Upon Dopethrone’s release, I’m pretty sure it was long-running, celebrated, Canadian heavy metal writer Martin Popoff, who, in his review of the album, effectively described Weird Tales – certainly a nod to Robert E. Howard’s original publisher of Conan the Barbarian – as ‘a major, caveman bash-fest’ and I’m not here to argue with that as it’s exactly what this cut sounds like. It’s a bit ‘punkier’ with a tad more urgency flowing through the tempo, but as with everything on this record, there’s a cosmic heft and an abnegation to society as a whole that permeates every single note.
As we stay in Conan’s realm, we get a sample from the ‘80s Arnold Schwarzenegger flick, before we’re greeted with another of the most well-known and portal-opening riffs in all of metal with the arrival of the gargantuan Barbarian. A complete, and total aural pummeling in the form of a massive, distorted, earworm riff, and a rhythm section that wields as much power as an asteroid hitting the planet. Barbarian is an example of Electric Wizard’s ability to not only hammer the listener into a pulp with riffage that is impossibly heavy, completely menacing, and dare I say catchy, but also to create a mood and an energy that drags their listeners into the trio’s black sonic abyss they dwell in.
I, The Witchfinder is a filthy, doomy, creepy‑crawl of the highest order, stretching to eleven minutes of psychedelic, reality‑warping, cosmic‑riff malevolence. This is followed by a brief reprieve in the form of the instrumental interlude The Hills Have Eyes, where Bagshaw and Greening ride an ominous yet groovy, behind‑the‑beat Sabbath‑esque swing, while Oborn adds trippy flourishes. It serves as the perfect setup for the sinister, pulverizing riff‑catharsis of We Hate You – a bleak, dark, yet strangely addictive diatribe against society as a whole, delivered through massive, overdriven riffs and a rhythm section that rumbles like a battalion of barbarians preparing to descend upon an unsuspecting village.
It is sonic nihilism of the highest order, an unfiltered descent into paranoia and seething anger at this wretched world, and it has changed over the decades, but We Hate You is perhaps my favorite song on Dopethrone. As heavy as Electric Wizard is, and as cynical and fatalistic as Oborn’s lyrics are, they are able to strike a very delicate balance of massively heavy and infinitely listenable. Dopethrone reaches its conclusion with the foreboding title track, a dense exercise in sonic cleansing through riff punishment. Oborn’s vocals, in a different dimension, might recall Ozzy at his most harrowing, but if he was trapped in a murky, black fog. There was simply no other way to end this monster than with a track as epic as this. A 2004 reissue featured the bonus track, Mind Transferal, but the definitive version is the original release for this reviewer.
Electric Wizard toured the United States for the first time on the Dopethrone cycle, and I was fortunate enough to catch them in Seattle, with my aforementioned friend, on Friday, March 23rd, 2001, at the long-gone Breakroom with Warhorse, Witch Mountain and Sourvein opening. Yes, it was as devastating as one could imagine, and yes, it was a long time ago, but I still have mental snapshots of that evening. As well, Sourvein’s guitarist that night was none other than a woman named Liz Buckingham, who would soon find herself pulled into Electric Wizard’s orbit.
In the end, after the Dopethrone tour, the classic Electric Wizard lineup, not surprisingly, imploded, with Greening and Bagshaw leaving to form Ramesses, before coming full circle and joining Dorrian in his post-Cathedral doom band, With The Dead. Oborn carried on with Electric Wizard, recruiting – and later marrying – Liz Buckingham, who joined him on second guitar. With a rotating cast of drummers and bassists, the two of them remained the central figures, eventually releasing another stone‑cold classic in the genre with ‘07s Witchcult Today. It’s fair to wonder if the seeds of the band’s split, and the pairing of Oborn and Buckingham, were sown on that US tour, but perhaps I’m the only one thinking of these things.
Dopethrone, a quarter century later, remains a cornerstone and a pillar of both stoner rock and doom metal. It is on the Mount Rushmore of these genres alongside such classics as Sleep’s Dopesmoker and Kyuss’ (Welcome To) Sky Valley.
A testament to this is the deluge of bands who, over the last two decades, have tried to replicate, not only this record’s unholy sound and energy, but also have named themselves after songs on it, I’m looking directly at you, Dopethrone and Vinum Sabbathi. However, as always, the originals are oft imitated but never replicated.
Dopethrone is the very definition of sonic nihilism in its purest form, and that is something that is a rare occurrence, like lightning in a bottle, as there isn’t another record like it, not even from the musicians that created it, and I’m confident there never will be. It is a singularity in the realm of heavy music, and it hasn’t lost one iota of its impact, even a quarter of a century later.
RIP to my friend Damon Baldwin, who turned me on to this album and so many more. Miss ya man.
Label: Rise Above Records
Band Links: Facebook | Spotify | Instagram
Scribed by: Martin Williams
