Our High on Fire Trip

High on Fire played in Bremerton, WA over the weekend as part of a little tour of the PNW. We drove up the day before the show to poke around Bremerton and visit a work friend.

I wasn't sure what to expect. In the world of people who care about acts like High on Fire, they're a big deal. Grammy winners, face-meltingly hard, but definitely an acquired taste. If you get past their sound, there's the whole matter of their lyrics, which are like an old Frank Frazetta painting come to life and dropped into an H.P. Lovecraft diorama.

My own affection for them probably has some limits. When it comes to the stoner metal pantheon I'm a lot more able to sit and soak in hours of Sleep, Kyuss, or Red Fang, but I kind of view that as a matter of endurance. But it's still a profound affection. They're so much their own thing, so uncompromising, and so fierce that I don't think I have much choice but to love them, and driving three hours to see them was a reasonable, good thing to do.

The show was on a Sunday night at an independent local movie theater of the kind that I remember seeing a lot more of in small towns in the '80s and '90s: Kitschy paintings on the walls, mannequins in movie costumes, auditoriums with numbers but also names from planets in science fiction movies.

We got there early and milled around, watching people filter in. It was an all ages show, so there were a ton of younger kids—ten or twelve years old—decked out in merch from one of the local opening acts, plus plenty of high schoolish kids and a bunch of old metalheads. Everyone was excited to be there but also just sort of chilled out about the whole thing.  I had to get out of Matt Pike's way as he headed to the auditorium, so that's me, somewhere in his subconscious forever as someone who smiled and nodded at him as I dodged out of his path.

Once we were let in, we found ourselves in one of those "tables and theater seats" arrangements like you'd find at a McMennamins or some other beer-serving Indy movie house. Some people sat around in the seats, others milled around in front of the stage. Everyone seemed to know each other. The vibe was mellow but anticipatory.

The opening act wore all their thrash and hardcore inspirations on their sleeves and played with a lot of heart. They were thrilled to be opening for High on Fire and said so.

The next act was an older outfit named Ocasta. They had a real sludgey, stoner vibe via Melvins and Red Fang. They were also great and I was sorry to see they don't have a ton of presence online because I'd happily pay for a Bandcamp EP of their set.

Through both opening acts I was sort of eyeing the crowd and wondering how many more people would show up for the main act. Turns out, not many. Almost everyone fit pretty comfortably in the front, and the holdouts hanging back to the rear of the auditorium seemed happy where they were. We hung back in the first row of tables, so it was pretty easy to see the entire audience, which was somewhere south of 200 from the looks of it.

High on Fire itself? Everything I hoped for. Relentless, driving, and hard. Their newish drummer—former Melvin Cody  Willis—is a spectacle in his own right. Just furious. Bassist Jeff Matz—whom I'm going to see when Mutoid Man is in town in May—is the most detached of the three. Into his playing, but very aware of the audience in a wry sort of way sometimes. Matt Pike just does his Matt Pike thing. They opened with "Burning Down," which has the benefit of semi-live studio video that captures what he's about:

I think my personal highlight was probably a scorching "Snakes for the Divine." 

The show was so loud that I could feel my clothing vibrate. The audience was into it. The band played hard and I wasn't ready for it to be over, but it was both awesome and punishing. Once the set was over, people hung out for a while socializing, and that was pretty nice to be around. It seemed like a pretty small, cozy scene. The contrast between the main act and the local openers was a little stark, but also made it feel a lot more intimate and warm: "Oh, right, I'm participating in a subculture," and as a giant in that subculture Matt Pike still has more in common with that 19-year-old hardcore kid who's just thrilled to be opening for him than he does with whatever his opposite number is in any other genre. Compared to the Portland crowd at a Thievery Corporation show, everyone just felt more like our kind of people. Into it, there to rock hard, but also pretty respectful of each others' space and devoid of a certain kind of entitled obliviousness we got from a room full of Gen Xers who got impatient with the edibles. 

On the drive home the next day we played even more High on Fire, then settled into the long part of the drive downstate to OM and then Sleep. I've got more to say about that at some point, I guess:

Matt Pike drives High on Fire with a deeply weird world view that he consciously fuels with copious amounts of weed and a steady diet of  conspiracy theories NPR made a game attempt to cancel him over.  When you play stuff from Sleep—his earlier project—you can hear how he ended up where he is even if it's much harder and weirder. OM—led by Pike's old partner in Sleep, Al Cisneros—has moments of heaviness but is also so spare and minimalist. Still, you can hear how it descends from Sleep. 

But where Pike traffics in a sort of apocalypticism, Cisneros has swerved into the more traditionally spiritual. In the metal tradition, you're not really meant to do a straight reading of the lyrics for meaning. As the metal vocalist is more an instrument or a layer,  so the lyrics are there to be heard and felt but not necessarily "processed."  Pike howls about demons and aliens, Cisneros free-associates fragments of Christian, Hindu, and Buddhist imagery. In their late careers, the two elders of stoner metal are both looking for some kind of meaning, but have taken divergent paths. It all helped the rainy miles down I5 go down a little more smoothly.

So, amazing start to the concert season: 

We'll be seeing X in a few weeks, then Mutoid Man in May, then we'll go to the Post Festival in Indianapolis in late July to see Converge, Bongripper, Cave In, Emma Ruth Rundle, and Pelican.