Dopethrone is the sound of a band that had run out of reasons to be careful. Released on September 25, 2000, through Rise Above Records, it is the third album from the Dorset trio of Jus Oborn on vocals and guitar, Tim Bagshaw on bass, and Mark Greening on drums. It is seventy-one minutes of fuzz so dense it has a gravitational field. The record's weight comes from the specific, documented wreckage of the period in which it was made, and from the fact that Oborn, Bagshaw, and Greening chose to walk into that wreckage and record inside it rather than wait for conditions to improve. Conditions, for the record, did not improve.
The gap between Come My Fanatics... in 1997 and Dopethrone in 2000 was not a quiet creative period. Oborn suffered a collapsed eardrum during a concert, set a car on fire, and later severed a fingertip while laying carpet. Mark Greening broke his collarbone in a motorcycle accident and was charged with assaulting a police officer. Tim Bagshaw injured his arm attempting to steal a crucifix from the roof of a church and was arrested for breaking into a liquor store. The band's drug and alcohol consumption, already substantial, had reached what multiple accounts describe as its peak. Rise Above owner Lee Dorrian, who had founded the label in 1988 while still the vocalist for Napalm Death and who went on to found Cathedral, had commissioned a follow-up to Come My Fanatics... and was waiting. The band arrived at Chuckalumba Studios in Dorset in May 2000 with three songs written: "Dopethrone," "Funeralopolis," and "We Hate You." The rest of the album came together through studio jams. The whole thing was recorded in three days.
That fact is worth sitting with. Three days, in a studio in Dorset, with producer Rolf Startin and assistant producer John Stephens, and a band in a state of documented hostility toward the world and toward each other. The mixing sessions produced disagreements about how the record should sound. What came out the other side is eight tracks running to over seventy minutes, mastered by Doug Shearer at Chop Em Out in London, and carrying the sleeve slogan "Legalise Drugs and Murder." The cover image was conceived by Oborn, a satanic figure getting stoned, and executed in its final form by Tom Bagshaw, Tim's brother.
The album opens with "Vinum Sabbathi," a three-minute piece that functions as a pressure drop before the weight arrives. "Funeralopolis" follows at nearly nine minutes, and it is here that the record announces its actual intent: a bluesy opening that dissolves into sludge, then accelerates into something close to psychotic. The fifteen-minute "Weird Tales" moves across three named sections, "Electric Frost," "Golgotha," and "Altar of Melektaus," descending from mid-paced stoner rock into some of the lowest doom riffs the genre had produced to that point, then dissolving into a drone section that functions less as a bridge than as a depressurization chamber. "Barbarian" follows at six and a half minutes, a compact slab of riff that sits at the album's center of gravity. "I, the Witchfinder" runs eleven minutes. "The Hills Have Eyes" arrives at under a minute, a brief interlude of pure atmosphere. "We Hate You" closes the penultimate slot before the title track ends the sequence at over ten minutes. Oborn, who wrote all the lyrics, cited H.P. Lovecraft and Robert E. Howard as the literary framework for his writing throughout. The band's name itself had been drawn from two Black Sabbath songs, "Electric Funeral" and "The Wizard," and that inheritance is audible in every riff on this record, though what Electric Wizard did with it by 2000 had moved far enough from the source that the comparison explains origin rather than destination.
What Rolf Startin captured at Chuckalumba is a guitar tone that screeches fuzz fully to the surface, a deliberate shift in the production approach that made the record feel more exposed and more brutal than its predecessor. Come My Fanatics... had a warmth to it. Dopethrone does not. The record has not softened with time. It still sounds like it was made by people with nothing left to lose, because it was.
The original lineup of Oborn, Bagshaw, and Greening recorded one more album after Dopethrone, Let Us Prey in March 2002, before Bagshaw and Greening departed in 2003 to eventually form Ramesses. The trio never made another record together. Dopethrone stands as the fullest and final expression of what that specific configuration of people, in that specific condition, could produce. The chaos between 1997 and the summer of 2000 was the creative process. The injuries, the legal trouble, the fractured band dynamic, the three pre-written songs and the rest improvised under studio lights in three days: all of it is present in the music, as texture. Dopethrone sounds like what it is. That is rarer than it seems.
