High on Fire awake from Sleep

PHOTO by LUKE MCGARRY

“Matt Pike never mellowed with age,” Ethan Miller told me once. “High on Fire stomps the shit out of you, and that’s great!” And except to add footnotes—Miller plays guitar in Comets on Fire, the Pink Floyd to Pike and High on Fire’s Black Sabbath—that particular observation communicates Pike’s true fealty to the riff (flensed and cleansed) in a way that only another hephaestian can understand. As frontman of Sleep—whose songs dissolved years of uptight metal—Pike went very far out, almost enough to see the tracks of guys like Holden, Stephens and Chen occluding in the snow before him, and when that band snapped (labels couldn’t deal with their hour-long Dopesmoker) it left its shocked members walking wounded. The rhythm section would get into chess, sunrises and a new band called Om, and Pike would make better clubs from old bones with old buddies and call it High on Fire—the crusher, the rager, the shit-stomper, noted in their own press for a “Neanderthal sense of purpose” (to recall the ur-men who clawed every necessary thing for survival out of whatever was slow enough for them to catch) and noted by the hephaestian population as the only band since Sleep to really return alive from that riff-filled land. What they do is a tiny bit more cosmic than the loudrock guys who just dig their hole deeper when they’re stuck for thinking—to even think that he might have a tiny wisp of the spirit of Lemmy got Pike all humble and sloppy last year because Lemmy (whose efforts in Hawkwind and Motorhead left mountaintops permanently denuded) never mellowed with age and Lemmy stomps the shit out of all eager upturned faces, and because Lemmy is a true believer, too: “To have that much faith in what you do,” Pike said once, “No one could even compete!”

HIGH ON FIRE WITH MEGADETH, IN FLAMES, JOB FOR A COWBOY AND CHILDREN OF BODOM LONG BEACH ARENA | 300 E OCEAN BLVD | LONG BEACH 90802 | WED MAY 21 4PM | $19.99-37.50 | ALL AGES | GIGANTOUR.COM

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