Walking the fine between Stoner and Sludge, Poland’s Dopelord once again demonstrates why they are among Europe’s most important Fuzzed Out bands!
When listening to Dopelord one is automatically transported twenty-five years back (approximately) - to a time when bands like Slo-Burn, Queens Of The Stone Age, Fu Manchu and so many others dominated the discussion which band could take the throne vacated too early by the demise of Kyuss.
Dopelord would probably not have made that discussion in the United States, but in Europe they might have, if the band had been formed earlier; but they only got together in 2010 in Lublin, Poland.
Yet their sound is near-classical with a few twists and turns that make it unique - and their latest EP Reality Dagger shows just that. The little details like the seven.tone-ending of the second track “Your Blood”, that short descent down the riff ladder is very helpful when leading from one song to the next. It calms things down a bit. This “slowly becoming more slowly” can also be generally said for the whole three-track EP and functions very well because it gives the record a certain feeling, which emanates not only from that slowing down, but also from the fact that on the last track, the EP’s title track and new 11-minute-opus the whole song plays with some paradoxes. On the one hand it is slower than the two tracks before. However, the vocals on this one are definitely harsher than on the other two songs because of the mix of Piotr Zin and Pawel Mioduchowski. One of them sounds like an aggressive version of Ozzy Osbourne and the other growls mightily into his microphone as if he wants to erase all doubt, whether this band is out to occupy your hearing for some time.
Dopelord might not develop anything new on their next demonstration of well-educated and elaborated European Stoner-Sludge, but how should that be done in a genre, that is based on repetition and on a certain fuzzed out sound, which by now has been around for more than 25 years?
Maybe only a trip back in time could help us with asking the protagonists of the post-Kyuss-era. And this help can surely be provided by Dopelord and their next time-machine!
