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Eyehategod > Dopesick > Reviews
Eyehategod - Dopesick

It's Dope and It's Sick - 97%

psychoticnicholai, August 16th, 2018
Written based on this version: 1996, CD, Century Media Records

A bottle is smashed, a man's hand is slashed, and it's all recorded for the rest of us to hear. That bottle breaking, and slashing Mike William's hand open along with the ghoulish screams that accompany it make a statement right out of the gate. Eyehategod is here to cause pain. The music on offer continues this band's rampage through the swamps, fueled by drugs, and ready to plunge a needle into the ear of anyone in range. If you've dug the riff-centered stomps of Take as Needed for Pain, this third album delivers a similar amount of hatred and mud-dragging riffage, and you will not be disappointed. This one has slightly improved production and some faster tempos, but don't get it in your head that Eyehategod is cleaning up. In fact, this album hits deeper lows thanks to that production and gets even more riot-like thanks to the faster passages. While the riffs of the previous album ruled and made it into a sludge landmark, Dopesick holds up just as well and with a clearer and heavier low end.

What comes after the smashed bottle and the screams of pain are dense-as-molasses guitars powering songs that push nihilism not just through their themes, but through their music. The muggy, thick guitar tone is always a constant given, as is Mike William's tortured howling, as is Jimmy Bower's and Brian Patton's balance between slow trudges, bluesy stomp-grooves, and mosh-charging thrash-like passages. It can make you feel like dying one moment, and then make you want to kill the next. There's also the matter of Joe LaCaze and his cymbal-destroying drum patterns that add even more chaos to the riffs, providing them perfect support, making you feel like smashing through a glass window while moshing along. The songs also hold together well despite Eyehategod's constantly trashed state with "Dixie Whiskey" and "Zero Nowhere" delivering deliciously consistent, punchy, and catchy grooves. It's surprising how these guys were able to be that catchy and that filthy at the same time, and they will probably stick with you like fly-paper after first hearing them.

Dopesick has a similar level of agony to that of Take as Needed for Pain, but it's more consistent and more well-rounded. While the groovier tracks are catchy and great for banging your head to on a hot summer truck drive, there's more going on and more worth paying attention to. The deeper and clearer sound brings the sludginess into focus and make the dirt of this album louder and more prominent. The slow parts are slow as drowning and the fast parts are as fast as death by trampling. The feedback is here when you need it and it is a force to be reckoned with as it's what starts everything off. It pierces you before the murk and filth of the guitars swallow you in their slow churn. But when things get fast, it's like a tornado in a mud flat. "Peace Thru War" and the faster parts of "My Name is God (I Hate You)" will get people piling over one another like a mass of writhing zombies. The way the meaty guitars barrel through such tempos gives me the impression a stampede is supposed to be happening, and the tonal similarity helps these passages blend into the slower bits. The slower parts are also no slouch, you can practically feel their weight as they act like sonic quicksand, sucking any unfortunate bastards down. It strikes the right balance between a brooding gloom and a hateful churn. Overall, Dopesick retains the painful aura and anger of its predecessor, unifies the sound more, and gives us a more well-rounded deluge of bile.

Dopesick is both dope and sick, and it's an excellent pillar of sludge metal. All the hate and dirt of the last album carried over so well, but this album did just a little bit more. You get all of the nastiness in a stronger, clearer package with the riffs still being insanely memorable and deliciously dirty. There are no industrial interjections with samples, and every song has some groove or some churn that makes it worth barging back to. Chances are you'll be humming the riff to "Dixie Whiskey" and gaining the sudden urge to commit robberies for some time to come after hearing this. It's perfect music for feeling like you've been through hell and feeling ready to dish out some hell. Dopesick has consistent killer jams and stands as a pillar of the genre for a lot of reasons. The songs are killer, the aura is crushing and infectiously filthy, it's got aggression and misanthropy combined into one, and it's catchy when it isn't drowning you in the bog, and it does this all throughout. Come into the swamp with us, man!

Sick Again - 100%

TheCureIsDeath, August 4th, 2013

Eyehategod makes me want to kill myself. This, of course, means it's working. Their famous brand of stoned, snarling sludge is enough to set anyone over the edge, in the best possible way. From the swampy, cold, and haunted In the Name of Suffering, to the warm-bellied whiskey production of Take as Needed For Pain, Eyehategod decimated the intellectual notion of sludge a la The Melvins, for a more violent, unconstrained sound that most bands in the style have since molded their music on. When I first got Take as Needed For Pain, I thought Eyehategod couldn't get any better. You know the drill: I was wrong.

Dopesick, Eyehategod's third album, starts off brimming with a violent energy. The sound of cracking glass, a low end bass riff, and feedback then explode into a screaming mess, reminiscent of a fight in a dirty bar. Every crash of the cymbals is another punch, every tortured word is another scream of pain, every burst of feedback a fiery snap of pain. Mike Williams' vocals seem more like a drunken junkie howl than the drawn out screams of In the Name of Suffering, but it hasn't lost it's voice or potency; if anything, it sounds more pissed off than ever. Jimmy Bower is Tony Iommi on a cornucopia of hard drugs, playing riff after exceedingly violent riff. And when I say these riffs are violent, I fucking mean it. Take the riff in “Lack of Almost Everything”, which coincidently happens to be my favorite Eyehategod song. It's bludgeoning, beating the listener down, and coupled with Mike Williams' crazed scream; it's perfect. Joey LaCaze's drums are beaten hard, like the face of some poor guy in the aforementioned bar fight. It's hard, heavy on the cymbals, but still a bludgeoning force, much like the riffs. Vince LeBlanc's bass isn't heard as much, because the guitars are very upfront in the mix, but his southern influenced bass riffs really add to the dirty feel of the music.

One thing to note is that this is far more a hardcore punk influenced record than a doom metal influenced one. There aren't any seven-minute songs or power electronics interludes, except for the sixteen-minute “Dopesick Jam”, which appears on the Century Media reissue. Now, that's not to say plodding tempos aren't to be found, because they are. Doom and gloom tracks such as “Ruptured Heart Theory” and “Anxiety Hangover” work well to separate the faster, more hardcore tracks, even is “Anxiety Hangover” speeds up a bit. Dopesick is out of control, contrasting the slower bits with the faster bits, all within the same song, exuding a bipolar feeling of repressed anger and depressed isolation.

These are classic songs. Eyehategod will play them for the rest of their days, and will always be cheered on by legions of like-minded misanthropes. This nicely rounds out their 90's trilogy of albums, and though it may sit below Take as Needed For Pain, it still is one of the best albums of the 90's, in every genre. This is an essential album for anyone who feels the need to kill themselves or others once a month, it's an essential album for stoners who prefer the hard life, it's an essential album for anyone who likes grating misanthropy and heavy fucking metal. So, tune in, turn on, drop out, and listen to Eyehategod.

One of the best ever. - 100%

MosquitoControl, November 27th, 2007

Eyehategod is a singular entity in the realm of heavy metal and Dopesick is EHG at their finest (or worst depending on one's point of view). Recorded in 1995 by famed producer Billy Anderson, twelve years later it remains an anomaly; it's been imitated, aped, copied, but never has another band come close to reproducing what EHG accomplished with Dopesick.

Sludge begins and ends with EHG, and no album better defines sludgecore than Dopesick. As a genre, sludge cobbled together bits and pieces from Black Sabbath's first four albums, the misanthropy of early punk and the righteous anger of Black Flag, along with the swing of late seventies "southern rock," like Lynyrd Skynyrd, Molly Hatchet and the like. Cover that sonic stew with static and tape hiss, mix in copious amounts of feedback and you have sludgecore.

Dopesick takes this sludgecore formula and amps everything up ten-fold. The entire record is drenched in feedback; it begins and ends most of the songs, including the first forty or so seconds of "Zero Nowhere," and the last two minutes of "Anxiety Hangover." Yet in between all this feedback are riffs Toni Iommi would sell his soul a second time to write; they are heavy and catchy, but more than anything else propulsive; Black Sabbath's "Paranoid," reimagined and reconfigured by guitarist Jimmy Bower into the ripping "Dixie Whiskey," and "Peace thru War (Thru Peace and War)," two of the most uptempo tracks on Dopesick.

Mike Williams' screaming "Zero nine," repeatedly, functioning as an ad hoc chorus to "Zero Nowhere," is almost enough to distract from one of the best grooves on the album. It's the kind of groove that shows up frequently through out Dopesick, tempering the grinding noiserock that might otherwise be overwhelming in its heaviness. The main riff of "Methamphetamine," wouldn't sound out of place on an early AC/DC record, so much does the song swing like the best rock and roll.

But what really defines this album is the palpable sense of futility and anger generated by the band, and as such, "Anxiety Hangover," the last song, serves as the perfect summation for Dopesick. The song starts off with amped up feedback blues, Robert Johnson's "Last Fair Deal Gone Done," played with the distortion pedal locked on, while the singer screams unintelligible invectives most likely about addiction or depression or whatever else a poor, hungry, broken down junkie yells about; at about three minutes in, it switches to an up-tempo romp for a few measures before deteriorating into a feedback laden crawling swamp dirge, ending with what can only be called diseased howls and a breaking bottle (a fitting end, considering the album opens with the sound a bottle breaking and the singer moaning in pain).

Yet I don't think any of this does justice to what is arguably one of the greatest albums of the last twenty years. Seldom before and seldom since has a band put so much raw unbiden emotion into an album, so much so that on Dopesick, Eyehategod sounds perpetually on the verge of collapse, held together only by shared anger at the world and a bitter resignation that this might be as good as it gets. This album captures the sound of human failure and frustration like no other, and for those of us who are dopesick, no matter what the dope actually is, this album is a palliative.