Dopethrone – “Transcanadian Anger” (2018)

Dopethrone’s new album is like that crackhead that breaks into your house, ravishes the vacuum cleaner, vomits over the kitchen, and then collapses half-dead on your carpet – in a clown costume.

"Transcanadian Anger", with its luridly apocalyptic cover, is the product of a band that’s comfortable with its sound, but more than able to make it do new things on every track.

That’s to say, you know every song is a Dopethrone song, with that trademark shriek trademarking away with the equally trademark guitar sound that drones, thunders, croons and writhes up and down the blues scale like it wants to give it VD. (Presumably, also trademarked.)

Yet each song has its own personality, its own sense of being. It would be too easy for the band to descend into generic sludge (and heaven knows, there’s plenty of that blocking up the doom metal u-bend these days). 

But Dopethrone’s output has never strayed near that pit, nor does it do so on this album. It’s too distinct, and (whisper it) too subversive.

Take Wrong Sabbath, where Dopethrone gleefully mutilates the core riff of Black Sabbath’s Iron Man by crushing and stretching it at the same time, while the lyrics bestride the massive chasm between total nihilism and total piss-taking. (And a very dead goat.)

Or the glorious Killdozer, where the band gallops along with the merry tempo of a kamikaze toddler that’s off their tits on bath salts. It grooves and crushes in equal measure. It’s music designed for speeding down the road to meet your dealer, with the sort of vast hooks that tear into your ears and which you can never pull out.

Tweak Jabber alternates nicely between the more manic tempo of Killdozer and a slower, crushing pace, crowned with an unrelenting twin-guitar crescendo that half hollers the blues and half drowns them in mud.

But what follows is the album’s masterstroke, Snort Dagger, a stripped down, relentless and utterly devastating cokehead anthem that smacks the listener over the head with its core riff, and refuses to stop until you like it. 

It’s difficult to make such a simple song work, but when it does, it sweeps aside all in its way. That’s quite something for an album full of other stand-out tracks.

True, other parts of the album never quite reach such giddying heights, to the point that it’s almost unfair for them to have to compete with the really good stuff. 

That said, the use of shrieking vocals by one ‘Julie’ (last heard on the band’s 2011 effort, "Dark Foil") on album closer Miserabalist is certainly a departure from the formula and so a necessary one. 

But it never quite stands out as it should, like it’s from a band trying something new but still not quite finding it.

That said, Julie sounds… terrifying, a contrast to the usual evil-but-gleeful rasp of vocalist Vince. Maybe irony eats itself in the end, so having a shrieking banshee on the payroll is what the band needs to stay vital? 

But as “Transcanadian Anger” shows, for now, the formula still works perfectly well, often frighteningly so. Fancy a snort?

SHEEPSCORE: RECOMMENDED (4 out of 5)


Available now on Totem Cat Records, and the official Dopethrone Bandcamp page.