High on Fire - Electric Messiah

Claiming to be putting forth your best work after an album like Luminiferous is a pretty lofty claim, but one Matt Pike did not shy away from during promo for this new High on Fire album, Electric Messiah. I suppose he felt pretty confident after Sleep’s surprise hit, The Sciences, earlier this year, an album whose mesmerizing heaviness and thick instrumental atmosphere swayed even a complete non-ganja-smoking dork like me in its favor, so I can’t really blame him for being so confident I guess. Unlike my experience with Sleep, High on Fire took very little time to convince me of their quality when I first heard their music after some series of iTunes or YouTube suggestions way back in the day took me to their 2004 album, Blessed Black Wings. After shaking off the Sleep-esque haziness of their first two albums, the band’s blend of thrash and sludge metal has retained only trace amounts of the stoner metal that Matt Pike has had a hand in pioneering. And that output has been relatively consistent from album to album as well, a respectable feat given the relatively short time between albums. Their eighth outing is, quite fortunately, no major diversion from that trend.

Born from a strange dream about Lemmy Kilmister, Matt Pike dedicated Electric Messiah to making something Lemmy would be proud to have so many attributing similarity to, with the title track a direct tribute to the late Motörhead frontman’s legacy. And I think this is something Lemmy would have enjoyed, indeed. I sure enjoy the hell out of it.

While High on Fire’s similarly to Motörhead is just as tangible on Electric Messiah as it is throughout most of their catalog, there is another contemporary influence that also seems to be pushing closer to the surface on this album than it ever has in the past. They’ve always been stylistic neighbors and the cross-pollination of influence between the two has always been present in both artists’ music, but never have they come so close together as High on Fire have brought them until now. And now, with Electric Messiah bringing High on Fire to a grander, more progressively epic place than ever before, their kinship with Mastodon is just as apparent as their inspiration by Motörhead. The rough sludge muscularity that links Matt Pike’s ensemble to early Mastodon albums like Leviathan and Remission is of course still there on Electric Messiah, in spades. I don’t think that was or will be going anywhere soon. But now more than ever, High on Fire are channeling that slightly psychedelic, cosmic, progressive metal that Mastodon made their name with on albums like Crack the Skye and Blood Mountain.

I know I mentioned the Mastodon similarity on this album a bit at length, but it’s not some glaring distraction that obscures High on Fire’s distinctly gruff, sludgy identity. And it’s not like High on Fire have never dabbled in progressive writing styles or psychedelic elements before either. The band have plenty of lengthy, winding pieces to their catalog and a consistently subtle, but audible, tie to stoner metal attached to their name. This momentary similarity seems more like a natural product of convergent musical evolution that happened to bring these already nearby groups even closer than they already were, at an intersection on their respective artistic trajectories. That being said, High on Fire occupy that musical space Mastodon so often do with similar competence, and they do so in such a respectably original manner, not copping Mastodon’s tactics or relinquishing their own drive to make a mark all their own. Perhaps the most impressive aspect of Electric Messiah is how well High on Fire maintain their signature high-octane thrash attitude amid their newly elevated progressive sludge.

The album really is pedal-to-the-metal from start to finish, even in the more novel and proggy moments. It kicks off with the pounding and relatively familiar “Spewn from the Earth”, a fitting display of the band’s usual meld of sludge and thrash. From there on out, it’s pretty much just High on Fire as they’ve already made themselves well known, as efficient and ambitious as they are pummeling, never straying too far away from the thrash they’ve made their name on, and that is readily apparent nowhere better than the heavy, blistering, whiplashing, Lemmy-tributing, rocking-and-rolling, title track. The double-bass drumming on that track is to die for! I really like the thrashy pull-off riffs that make great prominence on songs like “God of the Godless” and “The Witch and the Christ”, as well.

The band flex their progressive muscles harder than ever before on songs like the multi-sectioned (and heavily tom-laden) “Steps of the Ziggurat / House of Enlil”, the hugely long and desert-wandering “Sanctioned Annihilation” (where Matt Pike’s vocal melodies over sustained guitar sludge draws the most prominent similarity to Mastodon’s work), and the mid-paced closer, “Drowning Dog”, all while keeping the gritty, muscular energy of the faster, shorter tracks pretty steady.

The more I listen to it, the more I can understand why Matt Pike has called Electric Messiah a display of their best writing by far. I still don’t know if I’d place this so far above albums like Luminiferous and Blessed Black Wings, but it is definitely a compositional accomplishment nonetheless. Electric Messiah shows High on Fire at their full thrash/sludge energy potential, as thrillingly punishing as ever, while proving beyond a doubt to even the most hard-hearted critics that they are far more than a mindless, meat-headed side project. Yeah, after The Sciences with Sleep and this album, 2018 has been a pretty good year for Matt Pike musically; the shirtless dude is definitely on a hot streak he can be proud of.