Cassette version of Third Man's Dopesmoker, designed in the vein of classic Sony tapes from the 1980s. If you know, you'll know.

The latest (circa 2023) reissue of Sleep's stoner-drone-metal masterpiece comes to us from Third Man, who was also behind their last full length album The Sciences. This new edition has been remastered for all formats (I don't have the time to do a side by side between this and the Southern Lord version, but rest assured it sounds massive), and has been issued with what the label describes as a "deep cut", the nearly nine-minute "Hot Lava Man" which I think only appeared previously as a live cut on the 2003 Gilman St - Berkley, CA 2/21/92 CD, and is completely exclusive to the Third Man Records edition (which I'm sure will drive some Sleep completists right up the goddamn wall, seeing as how this album has appeared in like five thousand different iterations). So here's what I had to say about the main album track from the prior edition, with an additional look at the new bonus jam:

The umpteenth release of one of sludge metal's most legendary albums, the 2012 reissue of Sleep's classic Dopesmoker album offers a new re-mastering, new (and improved, in my opinion) artwork from Arik Roper, and a different bonus track from the previous edition released by Tee Pee back in 2003. Most doom fans know that this album itself is an alternate release of the ill-fated Jerusalem that famously was supposed to have been released by the major label London Records back in the 90s, but ended up being shelved for years due to the label's complete loss of interest in the release. It was later resurrected at the end of the decade, and an alternate version titled Dopesmoker emerged at the beginning of the 2000s, which has gone on to become the band's (and fan’s) preferred version of the album. Listening to Dopesmoker again, it's easy to see why this has become such a landmark of slow-motion metal.

Sprawling out for just over an hour, this titanic tar pit jam winds through a maze of gluey riffs and thunderous hypnotic tempos, shifting from a leaden crawl to quicker (but still pulverizing) grooves every couple of minutes. It's hardly a one-riff slogfest; just take a look at the copy of the band's ridiculous "charts" that's included on the insert - how these guys could manage to keep track of what they were doing and where they were going while smoking as much dope as they did is nothing short of amazing. The trio of Al Cisneros, Chris Hakius and Matt Pike crafted a towering monument to explorational heaviness on this album, pushing past the boundaries of Black Sabbath's dread-filled doom into more ecstatic regions of molten psychedelia and tectonic drone. All through the lumbering lava-like riffing and trance-like repetition of "Dopesmoker", you can hear the seeds of the meditational hypno-rock that Cisneros and Hakius would go on to develop with Om, and the bone-rattling guitar tone, chant-like bellow and molten war-riffage of Matt Pike (later of High On Fire) was fully formed here. The religious references and reverence for the Leaf were another aspect of Sleep's music and presentation that would be later adopted by a million stoner-doom wannabes, but here it feels unique.

Utterly essential. I can't imagine any serious doom metal/sludge fan not having this in their collection.

And then the new 2023 bonus song, "Hot Lava Man". Recorded at the Razor’s Edge Studio in San Francisco in 1992, this is a never-before-released studio recording of the band's obscure early tune, showing up for the first time ever on the Third Man reissue. How is it? Well, it's heavy as hell, no surprise. And it sure does sound like it was recorded back in the primordial days of Sleep, with a raw, blown-out production that makes the Sabbathian riff-o-rama sound meaner and more messed-up. It's a solid Sleep jam, gigantic down-tuned droning riffage with some of Pike's psychedelic soloing snaking around the lutching riff changes. The second half transforms into more up-tempo spaced-out lysergic slo-mo-boogie, more in line with the sort of American doom metal these dudes were listening to at the time (think anything on the Hellhound label in 1992) than the more form-exploding experimental power of "Dopesmoker" itself. But man, is this a mega-stomper for sure.