Named after Mount Royal – the triple-peaked hill around which the early settlement of the city was built – Montreal, Quebec is an interesting city and is hailed as Canada’s cultural capital. With a melting pot of different cultures and communities, alongside the predominately French speaking people of the province, it is the home of many musicians, writers and actors. Three of its nosier residents – Vince (guitar, vocals), Vyk (bass) and Shane (drums) – make up the premier Canadian sludge metal band DOPETHRONE. Active since 2008 and named after the iconic ELECTRIC WIZARD album, these Quebec natives emerge once again from the murky depths of Montreal after a six-year absence.
DOPETHRONE’s new album, Broke Sabbath, is their most diabolical offering yet. To quote the band themselves; “We went full ‘Volume 4’ on this one…We decided to turn up the ‘not giving a fuck’ knob to 11, stepped out of our rusty dumpster, gave it a spit-shine and lit the fucker on fire”. With that in mid, Broke Sabbath certainly is a chaotic dumpster fire of sludgy riffs that all the miscreants and ne’er-do-wells of the shadows can perform their demonic rituals to. From the very beginning, DOPETHRONE have been vehemently DIY, and this gritty punk attitude is at the core of this album. Even the album cover required the band fishing around in the rubbish and dirt to create an equally putrid piece of artwork that wouldn’t look out of place next to a death metal album. With that in mind, you probably have an idea being conjured up in your mind about how this album sounds – and you’d be correct if you said absolutely vile.
Despite being from the city of Montreal, DOPETHRONE know how to capture the sounds of the swamp. Broke Sabbath feels the musical equivalent of Resident Evil 7, with a whole manner of horrors being unleashed in each song. You can easily place yourself in a dilapidated swamp hut, held against your will by psychotic swamp folk that have been possessed by some form of black magic, eventually fighting your way out after a series of gruelling and grizzly obstacles that make you stomach churn.
The band’s last album, 2018’s Transcanadian Anger, was a ruthlessly heavy and grimy album, however after six long years of bubbling away in a cauldron of pure evil imbued with malevolence and disdain for all human life, Broke Sabbath is a hellish beast that cannot be contained. It bursts at the seams with colossal riffs and merciless drum beats, while Vince’s vocals sound like they have been extracted from a demon and transplanted into his voice box. DOPETHRONE have taken sludge to the extreme, with the grooves of NOLA sludge and the eardrum-shattering distortion of ELECTRIC WIZARD, it’s clear that the trio have thrown all caution to the wind. From start to finish the riffs come flying at you with an indelible intensity from all sides. It gets a bit claustrophobic as the album looms large over you, imposing and formidable.
The album opens up with Life Kills You, a sardonic track that wastes no time in getting to the meat and bones of what the record is all about: grim, sludgy riffing. There’s also a thrashy element to this song, its pulverising pace pummels you into the ground with no remorse. Truckstop Warlock is a suffocatingly doomy, distortion-heavy track that incorporates that ravishing ELECTRIC WIZARD-esque riffing that leaves you bloodied and bruised. One of the longest songs on the album is ABAC, that starts with a demonic spoken word intro before launching into an earth-shattering sludge riff.
Shlaghammer follows a similar formula to ABAC but is significantly punchier. It could be argued that it crosses into death-doom territory as the guttural vocals remind you of a MORTIFERUM track, but DOPETHRONE have more groove. Rock Slock, despite being eight-and-a-half minutes long, is a relentlessly paced track with strangely bluesy solos cutting in between the relentless, death metal-like riffs. Uniworse channels the sardonic tone of Life Kills You and just bludgeons you with brutal riffing whilst denouncing humanity as nothing more than a virus on the planet. Sultans Of Sins closes the album with one last flourish of sludgy death-doom, by this time your skull and brain are nothing more than bin juice and mulch which could be used to make an album cover.
After six long years, DOPETHRONE are definitely back and they’ve not lost their razor sharp edge. The sludge legends are firing on all cylinders, making Broke Sabbath a visceral, uncompromising, grotesque and vile album that is not for the faint of heart.
Rating: 8/10
Broke Sabbath will be released on 24th May via Totem Cat Records.
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