.jpg "TAKING FLIGHT On 'Blessed Black Wings' you hear the tolling of bong metal, the scream of hardcore punk, and the leathery flail of Motörhead.")
Matt Pike sounds less than charmed. The singer/guitarist for High on Fire — whose ingenious rededicated primitivism has put them at the head of the heavy-metal pack — is on a bus somewhere, in the squalid afternoon, with the gray winter spaces sliding by and wads of static infesting his cellphone. He’s keeping his answers short. I ask him why he uses Soldano amps, with whom he has an endorsement deal, and he says, without inflection, “Because I like the way they sound.” Paranoia glitters in the cranial darkness: does Pike have a problem with me? My accent? Could he possibly have read my review of High on Fire’s Blessed Black Wings (Relapse), for another publication, in which I suggested of one of the album’s gentler passages that “it sounds like he’s playing with mittens on”? Surely not! Nobody reads that magazine . . . no, no — stow your hack’s panic, little man, this is just metal-fatigue, brutal-touring, 10th-interview-of-the-day stuff. Be forgiving.
“I’m touring my ass off!” declares Pike, who’ll be headlining the Living Room in Providence on February 4 and downstairs at the Middle East on February 6. “I love it, man. I mean, it’s hard, it definitely ages you quicker, but at the same time I don’t feel right if I’m in one place too long. If I’m at home too long I get antsy.”
When High on Fire played Bill’s Bar in 1999, they seemed to have tumbled directly onto the stage from their rolling bong of a van, in a small, localized cyclone of fisticuffs and body odor. George Rice, the then-bassist, had matted, accidentally dreadlocked hair and a sort of rodent glare on his face, and Pike was wearing no shirt but one enormous bastard of a black eye — the product, he recalls, of a fight with Rice. “We’re like brothers, but yeah, he sucker-punched me in Chapel Hill or somewhere. We got in a big ordeal . . . ” At Bill’s there was a dazed but immediate quality to the band’s presence, as if they had stepped into a dream in which they were the most mad-dog metal trio in the universe, on stage, in the middle of a show. The performance was spectacular, Pike re-routing the monstrous drone of his previous band Sleep (called “stoner rock” by some — the correct term was “bong metal”) through the scourging, circular patterns of drummer Des Kensel and then adding his own unappeasably furious voice. “I write to the syllables of the music,” he says. “I kind of write to the drums, to the hi-hat — I take the simplest part of the beat and put vocals to it.”
