Stoner doom
Sung. Melodic singing throughout.
In short
Stoner riffs played at half speed, with thick fuzz and subject matter drawn from witchcraft and cannabis.
How it sounds
- Stoner riffs played at half speed, with thick analogue fuzz.
- Very low tunings and vintage amplifiers driven flat out.
- Nasal or incantatory vocals with lyrics about witchcraft, the occult and cannabis.
Hear what that means
- One riff, an hour
Sixty-three minutes as a single piece with an internal structure, rejected by its label for being uncommercial. Micro-variation in timing and attack is what keeps it moving.
Open on YouTube - Amplifier as the instrument
The distortion is speakers failing rather than a pedal, and the tone changes as the amp heats up. Recorded to be as unclear as possible on purpose.
Open on YouTube - Where the groove survives
Doom's tuning and tempo with a swing still in the rhythm section, which is what separates this wing from doom proper.
Open on YouTube
Loaded only when you press play — nothing reaches Google before that. 1 of 3 is cued to a second read from the upload's own tracklist.
The specifics
- Tempo
- 50-90 bpm
- Song length
- 7-20 min
- Tuning
- C, B or A standard on very heavy strings, through a wall of valve amplifiers turned up rather than a pedal — the distortion is speakers failing, not gain.
- Production
- Analogue, enormous and deliberately unclear. The guitars are recorded with the room in them, and the low end is allowed to dominate in a way no engineer would normally permit.
- Written about
- Cannabis, seriously and at length, Ritual, Science fiction and the desert, Repetition as a subject
What each part is doing
- Guitar One riff, repeated past the point of comfort, at a volume where the amplifier's own compression becomes the tone. Fuzz rather than modern distortion, and a great deal of it.
- Bass Equally distorted and equally loud, occupying the same range as the guitar so the two become a single indivisible weight.
- Drums Slow, heavy and behind the beat, with long spaces between hits that the amplifiers' decay fills. What is not played matters as much as what is.
- Vocals Sung, clean, and mixed well back — often drenched in reverb and treated as one more layer, which is a doom convention this wing keeps.
What it isn't
That the repetition is laziness or a drug joke. Playing one riff for fifteen minutes and keeping it interesting requires micro-variation — in timing, in attack, in how much the amplifier is allowed to break up — and it is closer to minimalist composition than to jamming. Sleep's Dopesmoker is a single sixty-three-minute piece with an internal structure, and it was rejected by its label for being uncommercial, which is not what a lazy record gets.
Told apart from
- Doom metal Doom is bleak and mournful; stoner doom is hypnotic and warm. Same tempo and tuning, opposite relationship to the listener.
- Stoner rock Stoner rock grooves and swings at a rock tempo. Stoner doom removes the groove and halves the speed, and the trance replaces the boogie.
- Drone metal Drone metal takes the repetition to its limit and abandons the riff entirely — a chord, sustained, for the length of a side.
- Sludge metal Sludge shares the tuning and the tempo and screams over it. If it is furious rather than becalmed, it is sludge.
The genres this one is most often mistaken for. Written, not derived.
History
Sleep recorded an album in 1996 consisting of a single sixty-three-minute track; the label refused to release it and the band broke up. It finally appeared in full in 2003 and is now considered a masterpiece. Electric Wizard took the heaviest and bleakest route available. This is Black Sabbath's most faithful disciple.
Descended from
Siblings on this branch
Sounds like this, elsewhere in the tree
- Death-doom 1.4 apart by rating · meets it at Heavy metal
Closest by the three ratings, among genres at least 4 steps away in the tree. A rating match is not a musical claim.