Wizardrone - Wizardrone

Wizardrone are a stoner/doom metal band that mixes in some awful noise driven by excessively distorted guitars. Both remind me of the recent crop of Electric Wizard-influences bands who simply don't give a shit that they sound like shit. The sweeping noise is aimless, perhaps less irritating for those baked out of their minds, but droning low end and noise are presumably much more pleasant when they're actually music. This is noisy nonsense.

There are stoner doom riffs that are quickly drowned out by the vocals, which are both awful and suffocatingly loud in the mix. A combination of boxed-in, distorted whispers and distant wails, drenched in reverb, and played through a three-inch speaker over a radio twice as loud as the guitars. From the first track after the intro, the vocals are so loud that they drown out everything else. The farting, distorted bass and guitars burp through, but it just sounds like ass unless you're so stoned that you'd find solace in sleeping with your head atop a clothes dryer for the warm hum, though I suspect that a Maytag's warm, dry tone would be more pleasant than this ugly, soaking mess.

Even worse, the vocals get quieter towards the middle of the album and the boring noise, rather than the bass of the repetitive stoner riffs become the focal point. This album was recorded in two parts, and apparently they learned a thing and a half about mixing between those halves, so in the middle it turns into lame Electric Wizard worship. The vocals get drowned out by buzzing guitars that worship the buzz and bass of their amps rather than actually playing doom metal riffs like Sabbath, Sleep, Stillborn, and Saint Vitus did. The only "S" these guys earn is "Sucking".

Are you so high on marijuana that it took you five minutes to read this far in the review? Go hug your refrigerator, it's mixed better than this collage of noise.