because eat a dick, this is still the best review of anything ever:
"Listening to Sleep makes you realize what a stupidly over-detailed language English is. I'm trying to collect my thoughts as I'm listening and all I can muster are shouted newspaper headlines like "BACKWARDS ECHO SQUELCH GUITAR INTRO OCCURS". Sleep take English and strip it down and streamline it into a form of pure meaning, perhaps only rivaled by Ramglish (if you know what I'm talkin about then you know what I'm talkin about).
This album kicks off with said squelchy-backwards-echo-guitar before a ridiculously long (which is probably the perfect length) guitar intro, in which the guitarist manages to repeat 2 cycles of the riff in over 2 and a half minutes. (Even though their names are on the front of this page I’ve made no attempt to learn them, incase they’ve got shitty normal-bloke sounding names like Steve, instead of righteous-superhuman-mystikal-Zen-motherfucker names of which I can’t think of right now) After this intro, you could be forgiven for forgetting what drums and bass actually sound like, which is great, because the rhythm section soon crunches in, and shave my knees and call me Mary if they aren’t the all time-greatest rhythm section you’ve ever heard. The band churn on, slowly fucking with this monolithic-fuckin-enormo-riff until 8mins 30, at which point, in the most ridiculously sub-human, drawn out voice you’ll ever hear, SLEEP-GLISH IS BORN, MOTHERFUCKERS.
“DROP OUT OF LIFE
WITH BONG IN HAND”
Is this the fucking greatest opening line to any song/album/anything ever or what? I mean seriously, stop and read that again. There isn’t a fuckin syllable wasted on this whole album. It takes him a whole 16 second to sing that one line, and it’s a further 17 before he launches himself into the even more ridiculous second line;
“FOLLOW THE SMOKE
TO THE RIFF FILLED LAND”
Then, just to emphasize the no-frills-attached no-bells-and-whistles form of pure meaning he’s just unleashed, he sings both lines again. After which, it’s heads down for another 5 or 6 minutes of outrageous stoner-rock (hahahhaha, this HAS to be about the only band on earth that probably wouldn’t mind the “Stoner-Rock” label) before OH JESUS, BENDY BASS LICK INTO 3 MINUTE FUCKING VOLCANIC META-SOLO. This is the first absolute stone-cold genius moment on this beast. This is the point when you realize they’re not “sub-humans” like I said back there, they’re super-human-7-foot-tall superior beings, fucking with our feeble minds and preconceptions. Honestly, most men would kill for this solo and they way they built it up.
I think the entire album up to this point was designed to knock to you the fuck out so that they could ram your shell-shocked mind with further pure meaning, mostly about weed, but (I like to think) also about a million other things that, if we keep listening, we’ll slowly start to understand. The band churns on for a fucking aeon, while the singer delivers his absolute-knowledge directly into your helpless brain. Your mind is outwardly thinking “WHAT THE FUCK” and in doing so, takes in absolutely everything.
The band stumble on, pausing now and again as if to say “yeah, we might finish here”, but of course they don’t, they career headlong into the next stupidly simple but effective riff, the singer’s wisdom forever delivered in this agonizing 1-note melody. At about the half hour mark the band start to jam on what’s effectively a 1-note riff until you’re begging for something, anything to remind you what you thought music was until 30 minutes ago. The band, amazingly, relents, fuck, I’m listening right now and all I can say is
FUCKING MOLTEN GUITAR SEEPS FORTH PURE BOILING WISDOM
SURGING SOLO PINES INTO ABSOLUTE
BUBBLING GUITAR EXCURSION TAPS TO UNDERCURRENT OF TIME, PERHAPS
Before this all subsides into the calmest, fuck, maybe even most MELODIC piece on the whole album. The chorus-ed up guitar picks a weird semi-melody over some of the most restrained and down-fucking-right TASTEFULL drumming and bass playing I’ve ever heard. This bit is fuckin unreal, honestly. The bass and drums are absolutely perfect, they’re hardly even there. I wish I was there the day they made up this part, just so I could soak up the genius. QUITE GOOD, IT IS.
The next part, no shit, is EVEN FUCKING BETTER. The band launch them selves headlong into the BIGGEST, INSANEST, GOODEST riff maybe in the universe, the bass actually lets the guitar play the bass while it does this relentless 2 note lick, just so that when he decides to join in the riff it pummels you 2-fold. Goddamn, this is the best bit. This album is the tits. I just listened to that whole section, the solo up until now, 4 times while writing this.
Then, they decide to prove that they’ve taken this whole Black Sabbath-stoner thing to its logical conclusion by blatantly ripping off the Iron Man riff, fucking with it for a few minutes, then discarding it and pummeling you until just after the hour mark, when they FINALLY stop. When you hear the end of this album it’s weird remembering that there was a reality when this music wasn’t playing. No wonder the band never did anything again after this. It could never be topped. It’s THAT intense.
And long, of course.
VERY, VERY LONG."
1. Dopesmoker 1:03:34
2. Holy Mountain (Live, 1994) 11:36
http://uploaded.to/file/nc6oir0s/Sleep-Dopesmoker-Remastered_Digipak-2012-DGS.rar
