from the LP Dopethrone, Rise Above Records, 2000Remember when you were first getting high, long before the days of glass pieces, and if we weren’t smoking a joint we all smoked from the same generic metal pipe: the basic 3 part screw-jobs of bowl, elbow, and mouthpiece. That pipe’s design, and the fact that we were young (often broke) stoners spending the last dimes of our lunch money on weed, encouraged the skill-building of what some lovingly refer to as “bowl-scrapage”---the art of extracting as much of the tarry sludge-like resin as possible from inside of metal pipes. We all knew that one guy or girl who, given the proper tool set to work with (which often contained everyday objects like paper clips, keys, and those medical scissors worked especially well), could take a used pipe and wind up an hour or two later with a bulbous near-black globule of leftover stankness the size of a fucking strawberry; I knew one kid that kept resin balls in his freezer, planning ahead for times of severe drought. Electric Wizard IS the whole musical embodiment of that resin (and the couchlock buzz that followed)!! If Black Sabbath is heavy like elements Lead or Mercury, Electric Wizard’s brand of heart-stopping stoner doom falls right around the Osmium end of the periodic pool, slowing the pace to that of tree sap & down-tuning the bass & guitars to such extraordinarily low timbres that the sound waves almost get stuck in one’s throat; they obviously use Ozzy & co. as a template, but arguably out-Sabbath the originators themselves, by leagues actually. Be afraid, be very afraid…and very stoned.
