Tag: stoner rock

How to Trip Off Volume: Elder at The Roxy

Rob Shepyer August 23, 2018

How do you get high? Flower? Shrooms? Synthetics? Running? There are many ways. Some of them led me to this style of stoner/doom metal in the first place but once I had first began frequenting those concerts and stood among other trippers before a stage where a high was induced through music, I realized not every method can be found on erowid.com. Volume can get you high. Walls of sound can break you through sobriety’s ceiling and beyond that threshold is an especially consciousness-shaking altered state. Few bands build walls of sound so high and holy as the ones featured at The Roxy at this show with progressive doom virtuosos Elder. related content: Earthless Liquified My Face At Teragram With Third Circle Visuals behind the projector’s eye, shooting liquid light on stage as if spitting venom like a Dilophosaurus on LSD, the stage was set for Los Angeles’ best kept stoner secret Yidhra to take the stage. Combining heavy, vibrating doom riffs with hallowed, commanding growls, and a theremin’s whirling alien essence, Yidhra’s sound is original and soul-stirring. Like if Sleep slept with Kenneth Anger’s Technicolor skull, this is dark-side of your trip black light metal to the bone. This

Weedeater and The Obsessed at The Regent: Blaze It Up, Fool

Rob Shepyer May 6, 2017

Doom metal is on such a comeback that I might have to become a pothead again. Until a few months ago, I had the hunch that thrash was going to have a second coming and be the biggest rage in underground metal, but at a time when Saint Vitus and The Obsessed are simultaneously touring, when Pallbearer comes out with a game-changing album, and Sleep returns to the studio, it is clear to me that Doom dancing is back in fashion. related content: Ascending the Holy Mountain- Sleep at The Fonda Theater Doom and stoner metal are siamese genres. Doom originated the slow, heavy, down-tuned sound that stoner metal altered with more distortion and fuzz in the guitars, a faster tempo and lyrics either about weed or things you’d ponder while high on weed. The month of May has huge doom shows booked by Spaceland for the Echoplex and Regent. To crack open the month, The Obsessed and Weedeater shared a stage to mesmerize Los Angeles. If you ask most people, they’d say that Weedeater is a bigger draw than the Obsessed. I suppose that’s partly due to the popularity of weed and thus stoner rock over doom but still,

Ascending the Holy Mountain: Sleep at the Fonda Theater

Rob Shepyer February 1, 2017

The greatest experience one could have at a concert is that moment of total release when the band taps into that one elusive hook that grabs you, doesn’t let you go, and makes you travel inner and outer space while standing in one spot. Seeing the legendary stoner metal band, Sleep at The Fonda Theater allowed me to fondly remember that electric feeling when I saw Mastodon at Coachella and lost myself to the song “Quintessence”, who’s chorus goes “Let it go! Let it go! LET IT GO!“ That letting go is a spiritual experience, the same transformative, depersonalizing process one might have at a Mega Church. For a moment, one becomes the universe entire and that whole universe only exists to rock out. Sleep is thematically a stoner metal band with doom metal licks, so why do I feel like their sound taps directly into the marrow of religiosity? Why does a band that sings about fantasy themes and marijuana name their album Jerusalem? Why at the end of that concert did I feel somehow enlightened or spiritually full? I didn’t know when I bought my ticket to their show with The Melvins and I don’t know now as I

Black Sabbath And A Weeping Manboy at The Forum in L.A.

Danny Baraz February 23, 2016

At a time when hippie kids were forming bands to sing about peace, love and flower power, Black Sabbath explored the occult, addiction and delivered the antithesis of popular culture. In the process, they gave so many marginalized outcasts of society a voice that spoke to their own disenfranchised existence. Freaks and misfits united under a common flag and scared the shit out of those who had always fit in. Can you imagine the bravery and despair required to write about the devil in a firmly Judeo-Christian world? Well before Kardashians wore Slayer t-shirts, skulls and black magic were a taboo topic amongst the proletariat. In the moments before Black Sabbath took the stage at The Forum in Los Angeles, I found myself fantasizing about being in my early 20’s in Birmingham in the late 60’s, resigned to a life in a factory for the next 40 years, going to a bar to drink my weight one pint at a time and seeing those neighborhood blokes Tony, Ozzy, Bill and Geezer playing a kind of music I had never heard before. Music NO ONE had heard before. Of course, once the music broke it REALLY broke and their seemingly nefarious

QOTSA and The Kills blow up the Forum on Halloween Night

Janky Smooth Central Command November 1, 2014

3 songs into a blistering set on Halloween night at the newly renovated Forum, Josh Homme proclaimed “I blow my load all over the status quo”. This lyric neatly sums up Queens of the Stone Age’s musical output for the past 16 years. Homme’s endearing sneer and tongue-in-cheek swagger powered the band through a fantastic career spanning set, with the encore featuring former bassist Nic Oliveri on vocals the only weak point. The hipsterish and indie costumed crowd (There were more H.I. Mcdunnough outfits than Heisenbergs) showed no preference between new songs or old as the band opening with “Keep Your Eyes Peeled”, perhaps the most laid back song of the evening. The band followed up immediately with “Feel Good Hit Of The Summer”, sending the mostly intoxicated audience into a frenzy of shouting all of the illicit substances in the lyrics right back at the band. Queens of the Stone Age have always been this generation of rock’s outlier; They have let mainstream success and acceptance come to them, with no obvious signs they were ever seeking it out. Although their debut album was released in 1998, Their rise is quite similar to the Seattle bands earlier in the