Hi, for starters wonderful weblog, but is any person else seeing the sidebar all messed up making use of firefox edition two? It truly is pushed about to your centre for me. =-=
Every now and again you need a bit of doomy sludge metal to offeset the effects of listening to too much sleaze and glam (not that I truely believe that part about too much glam and sleaze but hey).
This is as heavy as a lead suitcase full of bricks and languidly bludgeons you into submission before you know it.
If you like a bit of early doomy Sabbath or latterday Mastodon then these 8 tracks could be for you.
The album opens with a glowing slab of metal that is "Snakes for the Divine": all big riffs, fuck off bass and splintering drums adorned by Matt Pike's malign glowering growl.
But there's a lot of variety and ingenuity involved in the metal on display: "Frost Hammer" has the head banging rhythm, "Holy Flames of the Fire Spitter" (my favourite track and title) has a dark brooding Gothic edge
whilst "Ghost Neck" is almost in Motorhead territory and particularly bass-driven. "Fire, Flood & Plague" hits us with a shot of early melody before the sludge-hammer batters you again.
Where I really like High on Fire is in their ability to mix it up a bit. We have the deadly, slow and brooding "Bastrad Samurai" which is as close to Pike's previous band Sleep as we get here.
The other slower number "How Dark We Pray" is simply dripping with doom, like glass full of a dark treacle-like substance of mysterious origin...
There's a depth of sound on the album and it's an album that tries to be diferent and ends up kind of cool in a doomy metalic way. You can almost hear the dead bodies mounting up.
