Sleep
Dopesmoker

Damn what a hit! Damn! I can't find better words to describe the first impression upon listening to "Dopesmoker". Seventy-three minutes of the hardest music I have ever listened to. An unsettling sonic monolith, overloaded with meaning for the expression of a raw and violently elemental language. An album delightfully unbearable.

"Dopesmoker" is the embryonic version of the album "Jerusalem" - see the excellent review by humax4 - which came out in 1999 and marked the end of the road for Sleep (Matt Pike went his own way with High On Fire). Now, forget everything and look for THIS album - unearthed in 2003 by TeePee Records - which is the original tape of the live-studio recording without additional mixing and compared to the official "Jerusalem" is simply nastier, heavier, and more exhausting. With the addition of a second track, "Sonic Titan" which makes the purchase a must: I'm not kidding, it's not a suggestion. You have to get it.

Try listening to "Dopesmoker" at least once and get dirty. Then you can leave the album to gather dust on the shelf and THAT'S FINE. It's the experience, that of having surpassed this listening, that is important. Because this music is the perfect articulation of the inarticulate. An ocean of sound in detonation, the electric darkness. Christ almighty!!! ...there is no form or structure, nothing! The lava-like and incandescent flow of distorted sounds that slowly drip and gather into a dark mass of hybrid sounds between stoner and doom, pulverizing synapses and brutally lowering the attention threshold.

I crash against the guardrail, open my eyes, swerve, get back on track... the right side of the van is crumpled metal, and a headlight is broken... I can't... I should pull over and stop, maybe sleep... I can't... not even lower the stereo volume... the wheels scrape the side of the road, now I slow down and... I can't do it, my eyes close again.