DOPESMOKER
Sleep
2003

I remember a high school night hanging out with an ex-girlfriend and her friends at IHOP till around two in the morning where one of the metalheads at our table invited me out to his car to listen to a song he was really excited about. The song was Dream Theater’s “Six Degrees of Inner Turbulence,” which he did not inform me was 42 minutes long. I got out around minute 10 to go back to my date, but I’ve never forgotten that introduction. I ended up seeing Dream Theater with him a few years later.

Let me inform you that while the original version of Sleep’s Dopesmoker (released as Jerusalem in 1997) broke its 52 minute runtime into six tracks, the version I know is a full eleven minutes longer and presented as one song. That ends up being more true to the listening experience anyway – while there are movements and instrumental breaks, the experience of Dopesmoker is largely one outstanding build, grooving on this one riff and a seemingly eternal drone. Some people might find it too heavy, too oppressive – as far as metal riffs go, I feel it maintains a level of pleasant record store noise. Avoiding harsh noise, blast beasts, staying in a guitar tone without the shrill soloing of Kerry King or Steve Vai – it’s not quite “optimistic” music, but it never signals doom, either.

That drone doesn’t get repetitive because Sleep is just so fucking conversational with their playing. They will introduce new notes, fills, and solos with such a casual approach to the spotlight. Because there is such consistency within the album’s sonic vocabulary, changes in time signature and in and out of sung verse come and go almost without notice. There’s a drum part that comes in around the 35 minute mark that electrifies the same guitar riff under an entirely new energy, and then just as quickly the drums back out and let the guitar charge some speed on their own. When the drums come back, they return to the rhythm the album began with, but the guitar has built new layers and the bass is filling new gaps. It progresses over the hour long runtime into something that Black Sabbath would envy.

The lyrics themselves, which tell the story of a modern stoner “weedian” being transported back to Biblical Nazareth and recreating the world’s image under the Weed Seed of Eden, are performed in a growling chant. The actual process of memorizing and recording this is an almost comical and nightmarish story of battling the equipment and finding that once they started playing, the song got slower, “freakier.”

David Rees referred to this album as like a “Mark Rothko painting hitting you over the head with a bag of hammers” in the New York Times. The album can either place you into a ceaseless meditation on a comforting surface or you can listen attentively for every textured brush stroke. I could honestly listen to another hour of Dopesmoker. I could loop this shit. It’s like sitting by a waterfall. Writing about Dopesmoker, I am both inviting you out to my car to hang out for an hour and fully aware that your date is back in the restaurant. Maybe instead we’ll just set aside an afternoon to sit in the sun and listen on a Bluetooth speaker.

CATALOG CHOICE: The Sciences (if you’re new to Sleep or sludge/stoner metal generally, I’d probably recommend The Sciences first!)

NEXT STOP: Mastodon, Blood Mountain
AFTER THAT: Baroness, Yellow & Green