Stoner Rock Albums

[Juan Navarro]

Are you high? So am I!" Black Sabbath's Ozzy Osbourne infamously exclaimed on a live recording of "Hole in the Sky." The vocalist, Tony Iommi and the rest of the Sabbath crew got the stoner ball rolling before anyone even realized what the band was doing with those herculean riffs. It would be a while before heavy metal, the genre they spawned, would become fully realized and even longer before their impact was felt among the stoner rock and metal community that began to develop in the early 1990s.

With one unifying bond, both the rock and metal sides concocted their own version of the riff-centric, fuzz-drenched bass grooving stoner realm. The genre's parameters are often blurred with sludge and doom having a foot in both worlds, making distinct and complete "stoner metal" and "stoner rock" labels a bit ambiguous.

We've done our best to stay true to what, at the heart of it, not only sounds deserving of the genre tag, but feels deserving. It's admittedly a loose definition, but after scrolling through these picks, hopefully you'll understand the angle taken here.

Os Mutantes were kids when they made this debut: Sergio Dias Baptista was only 17, his brother Arnaldo was 20 and singer Rita Lee just 21. But their irreverent blend of Brazilian pop and Anglo-American rock (like that of their cohorts Gilberto Gil and Caetano Veloso) made for a wild, idea-packed ride where the tunes ("Panis et Circencis," "Baby") come as fast as the sonic surprises. It's one of the late-Sixties' most mischievous head trips, which is saying something.

The Baltimore duo's second album was the perfect deep-toking soundtrack for late-'00s indie kids: a drifty, velveteen set full of homemade charm, gauzy keyboards and hypnotic tunes. When Victoria Legrand repeats her "Oh, oh, oh" refrain on "Gila," it echoes around the brain, just right for times when everything else does too.

Conjuring guitar mass at the Church of Our Lady of Green Bud, this thickly bearded debut opens with what sounds like a wake-and-bake congregation harmonizing about a "red squirrel in the morning" and going on to sing of hummingbirds, meadowlarks and laughing children amid a swirl of strumming, flute-blowing and tambourine jiggling. Sublimely chill, the set flows like a brook; it can turn any inner-city weed-smoking party into a camping trip of the mind.

Turn off your mind, relax and float . . . off? Up? Out? On their breakthrough album, these Icelanders kicked up sound clouds that seem to stretch across the sky, laced with Jnsi r Birgisson's droning, bowed guitar, icy falsetto and melodies so spacey they barely register as tunes. gtis byrjun is seriously drifty stuff, ideal for laying perfectly still, going totally blank and imagining every particle in your body gently separating from every other particle.

Plenty of classic reggae albums came in instrumental dub versions, remixed for maximum hypnagogic effect. But this Lee Perry-produced classic by vocal duo Cedric Myton and Roydel Johnson is one of the peaks of Jamaican roots music in large part because it came pre-baked. The mesmerizing grooves and transporting tunes of "Fisherman" and "Congoman Chant" are layered with studio muck that grabs and holds whether you're feeling irie or not.

Jazz keyboardist Herbie Hancock began the Seventies by cutting a heady trio of electronics-laden albums, backed by a volatile sextet. For Head Hunters, he eased up on the mood and made an ultra-groovy funk odyssey that kicked off with a burbling, riffy 15-minute jam perfect for some heavy-lidded wiggling. The album went on to sell a half-million copies, which is an awful lot of black-light soires.

These Arizona punk rockers started out as snarling punks, but by the time they recorded their third album, they'd come out of the smoke-billowing neo-hippie closet to expose a serious Grateful Dead side. Up on the Sun is utterly golden, inventing their own strand of desert mysticism on bell-ringing guitar zoneouts like "Maidens Milk" and "Two Rivers." Singer-guitarist Curt Kirkwood sounds like Jerry Garcia hitting up the skate-park, and his bong was clearly always close at hand as he penned cotton-mouthed poetry like "Up in my head there's an animal kingdom/I am the king of the animals there." Extra stoner points for ending the album with a song called "Creator," about how religion is weird.

Dr. Dre's solo smash was named after a particularly potent strain of weed, which was fitting: With its bottomless bass vortices, Snoop Dogg's just-hit-the-bong flow and a laid-back vibe signaling a new kind of gangsta cool, The Chronic felt like an endless toke on a hot summer afternoon. A generation of stoners found it all but impossible not to smoke up their cars when "Let Me Ride" and "Nuthin But a 'G' Thang" came on the radio.

Recorded in August 1969, only hours after Hendrix closed Woodstock with the "Star-Spangled Banner," this big bang of jazz-rock fusion rarely gets credit for also being a psychedelic watershed. Horns and keyboards float and storm like electric clouds in a monsoon sky, their movements warped by echo, reverb, tape edits and loops. It turned the bebop innovator into a hippie-era superstar, gigging alongside the Grateful Dead at venues like the Fillmore West, while its trippy gatefold LP sleeve was a mandatory dorm room weed-cleaning tool for a generation.

The muzzy sound of four very high young men hanging out in Palm Desert, Cali, just making one of the all-time great stoner metal albums, nbd. Future Queens of the Stone Age leader Josh Homme provides the headache fuzz-tone and swinging grooves, and the CD version of the album provides a clue it's meant for deep listening, possibly while too baked to move: The 10 tracks are only playable as three "movements."

This stoned-soul masterpiece unfurls grooves that sneak up on you like kush cookies, with Questlove's funky one-beats appearing and disappearing like peas in a street-corner hustler's shell game. Sparkling with red-eyed tape effects, turntable tricks, handclaps and finger-snaps, its weedhead cred is capped on "Left and Right" with a baked MC turn by Redman and Method Man, who sets the standard for stoned-loverman Seventies TV-quoting free association: "Baby you got me like Joanie had Chachi/Until she got high and went and fucked Potsie."

Dub music might be the most accurate-ever musical translation of stoned brainwaves. In the hands of Augustus Pablo, who transformed his signature instrument, the melodica, from kindergarten singalong helper to the sonic equivalent of an indica-packed ice bong, dub reached its most sublime heights. This instrumental set is his chill-out masterpiece, with productions by dub's two grandmasters, King Tubby and Lee "Scratch" Perry, along with grooves by a Seventies reggae A-team and occasional vocal fragments that surface like half-formed thoughts before slipping away again. Potent.

A few generations have been blown away by this record, from Eighties post-punks to early '00s Brooklynites, who ripped it off mercilessly. (Phish loved it, too, once covering the whole album live.) The heady mix of quasi-African and Arabic rhythms, New Wave twitchiness and David Byrne's existential crises ("Once in a Lifetime" is only the most famous) somehow also seem joyous and even blissful. An album designed for both deep contemplation and maximum head-nod.

This double-LP classic of jammed-out blues and rock is, like any good trip, guided by a spirit of adventure and full of surprises. Many of the best parts come courtesy of the guitar tandem of Duane Allman and Dickey Betts, who are either locked in liquid harmony or taking off on jazzy flights of fancy. When they get seriously cooking on "Whipping Post" and "In Memory of Elizabeth Reed," all you can do is shake your head and say, "Siiiiiiiiiick."

"I have tasted the maggots in the mind of the universe" utters an ominous voice from what sounds like the bottom of a giant bong floating through outermost space. So begins the title track of the ultimate P-Funk head trip, followed by a soaring, echo-drenched, 10-minute Eddie Hazel solo journey that stands with the headiest electric guitar displays ever recorded. The rest of set is white-knuckled Black Power acid funk that will have you dancing in your head even if you can't get out of your chair.

"You'll definitely like our shit more when you're high," RZA said a few years ago. "Our shit is high music." Ya think? On their epochal 1993 debut, weed smoke pretty much rolls out of your speakers as you listen to RZA's stanky soul samples and cavernous, slow-rolling beats. The Shaolin mythology could only have come from stoned Saturdays hanging out watching kung fu movies, and on "C.R.E.A.M." Raekwon even offers sound advice on the perfect chemical highball to enhance your buzz: "No question I would speed, from cracks and weed/The combination made my eyes bleed." Disclaimer: If you actually do this, you might die.

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