Music

Let us teach you about Stoner Metal (and give you a chance to win Weedeater tickets!)

by Tyler Munro

Don’t let Stoner Metal’s silly title fool you into thinking that it’s not a legitimate sub-genre. While it walks a fine line between doom metal, sludge, and blues rock, it’s defined by its unique characteristics, some of which only have a little to do with smoking copious amounts of weed.

Musically speaking, stoner metal is best exemplified with long, slow-building songs characterized by tight, riff-oriented grooves and the occasional psychedelic splinter. But there’s also a pretty prominent humour element to the genre, as exemplified by bands like Bongzilla, whose Amerijuanican album wins the unofficial title for best pot-related pun with considerable ease.

To point out the ridiculous side of the genre can sometimes detract from how musically intense it can be: Sleep’s Dopesmoker punishes the listener with its title track clocking in at over an hour long. This is music to groove to as much as it is music to lose yourself in, and as much as it lends itself to lighting one up and spacing out, albums like Electric Wizard’s Dopethrone punish anyone paying enough attention to it with its sprawling, pummeling and all-encompassing riff-domination.

But those eccentricities we mentioned earlier? That’s the fun part of stoner metal, the other side to a genre that often takes itself far too seriously. With Wilmington, North Carolina’s Weedeater scheduled for play shows in Montreal, Toronto, and Vancouver over the next few weeks, we saw fit to offer you a bit of a primer to the wilder side of stoner-doom. We’ve compiled a miscellaneous list of some of the genre’s more noteworthy eccentricities: album covers, song titles, band names…y’know, all kinds of shit.

We mentioned Bongzilla’s Amerijuanican up top, and with good reason. Musically speaking, it’s not quite in the upper echelon of the genre, but hell if this album’s cover and title don’t make a case for it being one of stoner metal’s most important releases. It doesn’t hurt that their vocalist kind of sounds like he’s singing through a bong. Listen to “Amerijuanican.”

There’s a stoner metal band named Alabama Thunderpussy…I just thought you guys should know that. And y’know what else? They fucking rule. Listen to how they speed things up a little for a bluesier take on the song with “The Cleansing.”

Broken English isn’t limited to black metal: Portugal’s Men Eater have a song called “You Mean the Trash to Me.” This one’s got kind of a hardcore energy to it, but those fat ass riffs are unabashedly stoner-esque.

Musical shape-shifters Boris spent much of their discography getting in on the fun, and on one album even recruited noise-makers Merzbow for one of the only stoner metal albums you should avoid while high. Megaton is downright terrifying at parts, as you’ll hear in “…And Texas Spaceship” (posted in two parts since it’s too bloody long for a single YouTube clip, a pretty common problem within the genre).

The Men of Porn—sometimes stylized as “Porn (The Men Of)” and occasionally known only as Porn—are one of the hardest stoner metal bands to gather clips from, mostly since their name usually returns some pretty terrifying results. But it’s worth the search: spearheaded by Melvins drummer Dale Crover, these guys are as destructive as they are silly. Name another band that’d use a timpani on a song called “Comin’ Home (Smoking Pot On A Sunday Afternoon While Ufo’s Drone Overhead)”. That’s right, you can’t.

Oh, and the Melvins. They’re kind of an important stoner metal band. Maybe you’ve heard of them? No? Check out “Hooch” off Houdini above.

Acrimony has an album called Tumuli Shroomaroom, and its seventh track is “Motherslug (The Mother of All Slugs).” Yup.

Cough’s Ritual Abuse is just flat out nasty. This is the kind of stuff nightmares are made of, just, y’know, with a big cloud of smoke surrounding it. Check out the title track.

The main inspiration behind this whole write-up was so we could give you all a bit of a background for a cool give-away we’re peddling. We’ve got tickets to all of Weedeater’s Canadian dates, but before we tell you how to win, we just want to point out that they’ve got an album called God Speed and Good Luck and another titled And Justice For Y’all. Check out the former’s title track.

And about those tickets: just, like, tweet us or something. Tell us your favourite stoner movie or whatever. As stoner metal proves, it doesn’t need to be complicated.