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. Side by side →
- 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. Side by side →
- Drone metal Drone metal takes the repetition to its limit and abandons the riff entirely — a chord, sustained, for the length of a side. Side by side →
- Sludge metal Sludge shares the tuning and the tempo and screams over it. If it is furious rather than becalmed, it is sludge. Side by side →
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.