De vermis mysteriis
Even in High on Fire’s hometown of Oakland, attempts to usurp Matt Pike’s throne (replete with screaming, shirtless frontmen) have only served as a reminder that there\'s absolutely nothing like the real thing. Titled after a 1936 book of magic, High on Fire’s sixth and most ferocious album, *De Vermis Mysteriis*, was produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou. “Serums of Liao” opens with a sonic assault, as Dez Kensel’s double kick-drum fires on all cylinders alongside Jeff Matz’s mountain-moving, Cliff Burton–born bass leads. Over this, Pike unleashes a blustering onslaught of six-string maelstroms as he howls in descending tones about potions forged from a black lotus. Throughout the album, Pike’s conceptual musings are threaded by a supernatural mythos about Jesus Christ being born a twin brother with the ability to travel through inter-dimensional time portals. Anyone familiar with Pike’s days in the band Sleep will appreciate the similarly sludgy “King of Days” and “Warhorn.” Still, it’s on aggressive songs like “Bloody Knuckles” and “Fertile Green” where High on Fire burns brightest.
High On Fire’s new album, De Vermis Mysteriis. Produced by Converge guitarist Kurt Ballou at God City Studios in Salem, MA, the record marks the next devastating chapter in High On Fire’s gloriously unhinged metal saga. “It’s a fuckin’ awesome album,” Pike enthuses. “I think it’s kind of a cross between the experimentation of Death Is This Communion and the driving darkness ofBlessed Black Wings. There’s plenty of thrashy stuff, but there’s also a lot of Sabbathy doom-type stuff.” “We didn’t try to plan it all out this time,” he adds. “We kind of waited ’til we were on the spot and had to do something. We had the basic skeletons of the songs—we were prepared—but there was a lot of improvisation. There’s a lot of soul on this one, and it’s got a rollercoaster kind of feel.” The album’s title (translation: “The Mysteries of the Worm,”) is a nod to a fictional grimoire conceived by the late, great Psycho author Robert Bloch in 1935 and later incorporated into horror master H.P. Lovecraft’s renowned Cthulu Mythos. “It’s a concept record, a little bit,” Pike offers. “I got this idea about Jesus Christ and the Immaculate Conception: What if Jesus had a twin who died at birth to give Jesus his life? And then what if the twin became a time traveler right then? He lives his life only going forward until he finds this scroll from an ancient Chinese alchemist who derived a serum out of the black lotus—which is actually in Robert E. Howard’s ‘Conan’ stories—and then he starts traveling back in time. He can see the past through his ancestors’ eyes, but his enemies can kill him if they kill the ancestor that he’s seeing through at the time.Basically, he keeps waking up in other people’s bodies at bad times. It’s kinda like that old TV show Quantum Leap. Kurt actually pointed that out to me after I told him the idea. But whatever—time travel is a killer concept.”
Following the glossy sheen of 2010's Snakes for the Divine, High on Fire get back to doing what they do best: sweaty, thrashing, chipped-tooth stoner metal.
Dating back to his days in the metal leviathan Sleep, Matt Pike has been obsessed with the arcane. But where Sleep’s opus, Jerusalem/Dopesmoker, lets its godlike drones do most of the chanting, Pike’s subsequent band, High On Fire, is far more articulate—in a guttural sort of way, of course. Even the outfit’s most…
While one would be hard-pressed to characterize any of the album's in High on Fire's devastating oeuvre as particularly "weak," there was certainly a mild sense of creative stasis hovering around the band's final efforts for Relapse; and it took a lengthy break and an unqualified return to form via 2010's Snakes for the Divine (their first release through eOne Entertainment) to really set things to right.