I was very pleased to finally get a copy of Dopethrone on vinyl recently. It's not hard to come by online (I'd never seen it in real life before), but for a long time the only one regularly available was on black vinyl - there had been so many represses on different colours it seemed a shame to settle on black. On a trip to Brighton I was very excited to see this pink vinyl copy in Resident records and quickly added it to the small pile of records I was buying. I'm guessing this is from the 2015 repress but I can't find any detail on how many are of this colour.
Dopethrone was my introduction to Electric Wizard. I'd known about the band for a while and think I'd just read that Dopethrone was their finest album. They were playing in Bristol soon and I figured I should actually listen to one of their albums first, so went into HMV and bought Dopethrone. That was 7 years ago and remains one of the best choices I ever made. At £13 it was expensive for a cd but the second I pressed play I knew I was in for a treat.
I'm quite picky when it comes to metal, but Electric Wizard are my perfect idea of metal - huge riffs, distortion, sludge, doom, listenable vocals (a lot of metal fails this one) and punishing drums. But they also have this blues edge that takes you right back to Black Sabbath. The intro to Funeralopolis has this incredible blues guitar played over fuzz and drums that never fails to put a smile on my face (nor, for that matter, does the huge outro or "Nuclear warheads ready to strike / The world is so fucked, let's end it tonight"). I'm a fan of the whole album, but side-A here is just perfect - Vinum Sabbathi and Funeralopolis are two of my favourite Electric Wizard songs. Barbarian follows the slow Weird Tales perfectly; after the drawn out outro Barabrian almost sounds like a punk song in it's speed and delivery. I, the Witchfinder and We Hate You on side-C also deserve a mention for being mind-blowingly good songs.
I gave a copy of the cd to my friend Hugh who was also coming to the show who described the band in a brilliantly succinct text message when he first listened to the album: "the second song is 2 weeks long. I feel like I'm stoned". I think the band would be happy with summary.
Format: Double 12", gatefold sleeve
Tracks: 9
Cost: £23 new
Bought: Resident Records, Brighton
When: 13/07/16
Colour: Pink marle
Etching: none
mp3s: no
