Classic Album Review : Sleep - Dopesmoker (2003)
There is an inherent mysticism to any form of music. Whether you want to admit it or not, there is something profoundly trippy about vibrations in the air evoking different images and feelings to different people. This is why music’s been an integral part of religion since the dawn of time. This is also why drugs have such a paradigm shifting effect on your appreciation of different musics and also why albums like Sleep’s iconic Dopesmoker exist.
Whatever your opinion about weed is, it brought us this soul-searching monument to heavy music.
What makes Dopesmoker so special is simple: It’s one album and one song. Sixty-three minutes of mystical guitar riffing, vocal incantation and Earthquake-like drumming that is to be taken subjectively, symbolically and at face value. It’s a prism through which you can consider your own experience and the best possible argument for you to start smoking weed. I know this sounds like an idiotic gimmick, but it’s not. It wouldn’t have survived the test of time if it was.
Riffology 101 (Riffs & God)
Contrary to popular belief, the primary tenet of doom metal isn’t slowness. It’s the establishing of a relationship between heaviness and time. That is why the songs are longer, slower and often repetitive. It builds layers over the same riffs in order to influence your perception and shift the storytelling in a specific way. This is why smoking weed is so central to appreciating a song like Dopesmoker. You don’t HAVE to do it, but it helps texturing the experience.
Matt Pike’s slow, marching guitar riff is really the canvas on which Dopesmoker is built. Outside from a couple short solos, it is the beating heart of the song for sixty-three minutes. With the help of Chris Hakius’ pounding drum, it settles inside your chest like cosmic vibrations. On my first couple listens, I did not even pay attention to the lyrics. I was so taken by the density and the texture of the sound, my mind started wandering in deserted landscapes.
Not to disrespect Al Cisneros, but I don’t think the lyrics are as important as his bellowed delivery. If you pay attention to it, it follows the stretched out notes of Pike’s guitar riff. Dopesmoker is very much a modern incantation. Whether you’re into drugs or not doesn’t matter, it’s about the ascetic pleasures of isolating yourself with something that helps you transcend reality. Whether it’s through drugs, art or physical activity, it’s a journey between you and infinity.
Sleep & the Shattering of Boundaries
Dopesmoker isn’t the longest doom metal song by far. Bell Witch’s Mirror Reaper is almost 50% longer and rules for completely different reasons, but it’s not long for the sake of being long. The sheer length of Dopesmoker is meant to put you in a different mindset before it even starts. You’re not supposed to expect a beginning, a middle and an ending. It is meant to isolate you with the riffs and the vibrations. It is meant to detach you from your self.
This is where the genius of the song is most apparent, I find. It connect you with what I think it the true purpose of music: to lose yourself in vibrations and abandon reality for a blessed moment. The length of Dopesmoker isn’t a challenge, but rather a gift. The longer you stay on this pilgrimage, the more separated you become from your boundaries (job, responsibilities, physical limitations) and bathe in this ocean on infinite possibilities.
By obscenely breaking the boundaries of conventional songwriting, Dopesmoker breaks through the boundaries of how you experience the world and inspires you with visions of who you can be.
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I don't have much negative criticism of this album. Perhaps only that Sleep’s single-minded obsession with weed somewhat undercuts the scope and the originality of this project. The weed is a gateway to a higher level of consciousness here and not an end in itself. So, it could’ve been a little more straightforwardly introspective? I don’t think that lyrics matter for this song but it might’ve been an even deeper and more meaningful experience if they did?
Anyway, this isn’t just a doom metal classic. It’s a triumph of heavy metal songwriting. An odyssey of primordial vibrations that is intense and lengthy enough to interfere with your own way of viewing the world. It’s not something you listen to eight times a day (although you could), but it serves a clear and important purpose. I love this fucking record to death. Mostly because it illustrates everything that is fun, magical and transcendent about drugs.
