By all rights, I should hate these guys. Potheads* are, by and large, usually about as interesting as moss. (*By this I mean people for whom marijuana consumption is a part of their identity rather than something they do, otherwise I’d have to burn my record collection).
But holy crap on a sheepskin, yeah. I don’t know why people call them a doom metal group, since its clearly closer to the sludge rock side of things, but the larger issue is that a 64 minute track called Dopesmoker manages to be goddam incredible. It should be the worst album concept of all time, but it’s not. Really. Unless you don’t like the slow-and-low distortion and chant-yelling (chelling?) stuff, in which case you’re probably a narc.
The three guys in Sleep disbanded a bunch of years ago and went on to form bands like Om and High on Fire. I don’t really care for High on Fire but I’ll check out Om soon.
I bought Dopesmoker last night from the iTunes store, and it took maybe 7 minutes to get the whole thing. I would like to see what the insane cover looks like close up (like all things vaguely metal, math notebook doodles abound, but these are the coolest boobs-and-swords-and-hashishim scribbles ever.
here there be rodents 
Be sure to look up Holy Mountain if you haven’t already!
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“Potheads are, by and large, usually about as interesting as moss.”
This is amusing once you find out there is actually an English band called Moss who do the whole “hey, we’re totally downered out of our minds dude pass the bong brother” sludge thing.
Most people refer to Sleep as “doom” because most people have trouble separating stoner from doom. Mixing up both is quite an easy thing to do. God forbid that they start using the term “stoner doom”, that’s just not on.
i’m not entirely sure what the line between stoner and doom is, beyond aesthetics. both are pretty slow.
dopesmoker is both a great song and yet has some of the dumbest lyrics ever put to music.
i will check out some moss!
Yeah, both are pretty slow but even Black Sabbath and Saint Vitus had their uptempo songs. Doom bands tend to be more into depression and amphetamines whilst stoner bands tend to be still stuck in the late sixties when that whole psychedelic rock scene was the happening thing. Both were separated further once Cathedral kick-started that whole funeral doom thing and it started to get a whole lot more evil. Here’s where your line gets drawn.
I think I’ll ignore those that combine their doom with stoner influences for the sake of conciseness.