Electric Wizard

Black chant mirrors the song of the stars

Open the abyss dreamt from afar

Abominations drawn to our dimension

Feed black desires, aid human ascension

When in the early '90s bands like Kyuss and Sleep codified what we now recognize as stoner - closer to rock in the case of the former, closer to metal in the case of the latter - it was clear that, alongside the dryness of their desert sound, its blues roots and its slowed-down, "stoned" pace (as if numbed by some mind-altering substance), the doom metal riffs of Black Sabbath also figured among the genre's foundational influences. It was equally clear, then, that stoner could evolve in either direction: toward psych and space-rock shores, or toward terrifying doom and sludge-metal swamps.

Squaring the circle on the metal side of stoner could only happen in England - specifically in Dorset - at the hands of a bunch of Black Sabbath obsessives. The band that would push the dry, syncopated, down-tuned riffs of stoner to their most extreme metal consequences were none other than Electric Wizard, who took their name by fusing the titles of two songs by Ozzy Osbourne's band, "The Wizard" and "Electric Funeral".

Formed in 1993, the band from Wimborne Minster released their eponymous debut in 1995. It's a very solid, stark work that already hints at stoner touches, but remains through and through a doom metal record. It's two years later, with the vicious "Come My Fanatics...", that Electric Wizard flip the proportions of their own recipe and arrive at the definitive stoner-metal formula, the starting point for every extremist exegete of the genre. In truth, the 1997 record would have stood as a perfect stoner-metal milestone in its own right, had the band not then, in 2000, given birth - or perhaps it's more apt to say given darkness - to their absolute masterpiece: "Dopethrone".

The music on "Dopethrone" really does sound like a vortex of magma slowed down, distorted and made heavier than anyone in doom had yet dared. It's here that the anguished hard-rock voice of Jus Osborn, lost in a devastating cosmos, his guitar - which instead of exploding constantly implodes, as if mimicking the dynamics of black holes - Tim Bagshaw's crackling, martial bass, and Mark Greening's deaf, inexorable drumming all reached their nihilistic, distortion-soaked zenith.

"Dopethrone" also represents the thematic and ideological summa of the band's work, turning out to be a pitch-black crossover of literary and cinematic references that shares some of its leitmotifs with classic stoner while extending into gothic and grotesque territory. Both the album's title, translatable as "the throne of dope", and its iconic cover art, depicting a Mephistophelian horned figure smoking a pipe, point to the genre's beloved relationship with drug use. Elsewhere on the cover we can glimpse a row of menacing hooded figures, as well as twisted, gigantic architecture from another civilization; both elements, together with numerous cues from the album's lyrics, instead point to the terrifying literature of Howard Phillips Lovecraft. Horror cinema is central to the record too, which pays tribute, for instance, to horror master Wes Craven with the instrumental interlude "The Hills Have Eyes", a brief, brutal piece inspired by the murderous rednecks of the film of the same name.

Opening the sonic delirium of "Dopethrone" is a short but incisive track, "Vinum Sabbathi", a few minutes that kick off the crackling, mesmeric dances of a horrific, reckless bacchanal that puts both spirit and hearing to the test. The opener flows into one of the absolute masterpieces of stoner metal, "Funeralopolis", perhaps the genre's definitive peak, the final evolution of the Sabbath-esque "Hand Of Doom", "Children Of The Grave", "Under The Sun" or "Symptom Of The Universe". We find ourselves in a necropolis haunted by the ghosts of an extinct civilization, sketched first by a desert-dry blues arpeggio and then by a bleak riff as inexorable as a mammoth's footsteps. The two musical figures follow one another against the backdrop of Osborn's feral screams, until the deafening finale of searing heavy metal guitar solos and flanger effects that shred the wall of sound down to nothing.

Then comes one of the most ambitious tracks of an entire career, a long four-movement suite (running over a quarter of an hour) titled "Weird Tales/Electric Frost/Golgotha/Altar Of Melektaus". The imaginative lyrics conjure alien civilizations lifted straight from Lovecraft's "At The Mountains Of Madness", while the music is a shifting, cosmic ride. At first we find ourselves in the middle of an iron-clad stoner assault, then hard rock accelerations spill into a noxious sludge-metal quagmire, where the drums thud dully like the strokes of an exhausted swimmer still far from the saving shore. Which, needless to say, he'll never reach. Everything eventually dissolves into a majestic, droning finale, close to the most claustrophobic space sounds, where it all collapses in on itself like a dying star until it's pulverized completely.

After so much complexity, we arrive at "Barbarian", almost a single within such a dark album, and "I, The Witchfinder", which lands as devastating as a slow but unstoppable lava flow, with oppressive distortion, filtered screams and a pure sense of anguish. That the band's music also stems from a radical sense of misanthropy or distrust in humankind is palpable on "We Hate You", but it's certainly on the title track that they push past new limits. A new riff that would be an understatement to call monolithic, forever balanced between doom rhythms and stoner sounds, taking the band's ideas to their most extreme conclusions. Two versions exist: the first running twenty minutes, and a later, shorter one of ten minutes.

The first Japanese edition, and later every reissue from 2004 onward, included the bonus track "Mind Transferal", fifteen minutes of doom-space experimentation that leaves no room for compromise: pure infernal chaos.

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15/05/2022