High on Fire "Blessed Black Wings" CD
[Relapse]
Whoa... this fucker opens with a bang and immediately crushes all of the band's past work! High on Fire has damn sure improved over the years, going from what I initially found to be incredibly boring rock-based material to this: A thicker, more metallic, more diverse, absolutely crushing slab of gritty material drawing as much from Motörhead and Black Sabbath as it does from midpaced thrash metal, while sounding very little like any of that stuff. These songs are just fucking awesome. The riffs are darker, heavier, and more involved, the vocals are an incredibly forceful form of yelled singing with immeasurably gruff texture, the drumming is powerful and drops tons of awesome fills and hard-hitting double bass work... seriously, this shit is just killer. I'm blown away. The band has improved tenfold since 2002's "Surrounded by Thieves", which I already liked a ton more than their debut. Just check out the crunchy rhythms and dissonant chords in "The Face of Oblivion", which drops out to faint melodic lead riffing that builds back into a winding close. "Brother in the Wind" is more subtly melodic in its chord progressions and has a Wino-esque tinge to its vocal performance (lending a more memorable air to the piece on some level), but still keeps things acerbic with some noisy lead playing. The noisier aspects of the solos are what I would rank as the most clearly connected to the band's past work or the rest of this associated genre as a whole, as their overall songwriting and delivery has changed so drastically on this outing that I feel they've far surpassed most of their contemporaries. Both "Devilution" and "Cometh Down Hessian" have some thrashy picky patterns stirring things up (most notably in the latter), and the title track (which hits near eight minutes) messes with some choppy time signatures before briefly dropping back to lighter distortion and surging into an insanely sinister passage that runs a pretty consistent level of pummeling heaviness throughout. "To Cross the Bridge", another of the longer songs, opens with some brilliant acoustic guitars before plowing into another ominous churn of power chord rhythms with a slick amount of dissonant melody and a really intense picking attack that adds a lot of power to the playing, later tossing around tons of rocked out leads with plenty of fiery distortion; with closer "Sons of Thunder" opening even quieter with some lightly plucked clean guitars under watery sounding effects, kicking in distortion for a killer midpaced instrumental jam with tasteful repetition and thunderous percussion that really carries itself well for seven minutes. The shortest and fastest track is "Silver Back", which flirts with a little more of a hardcore/punk angle (more so than some of the clearer Motörhead influences, that is). There's really a lot going on with this one. Damn near every song tops five minutes, some topping seven, but they pull it off without things getting boring at all, balancing more basic repetition with unexpected changes and creative riffing just right. The record was produced by Steve Albini and sounds fucking stellar. Of course it's got his natural tonalities happening, and god damn does that make things sound perfect for this effort. The drums are a little distant but the dude hits hard as hell so the performance packs a wallop, and the bass gets lost behind the guitars, but fuck it. The guitars are thick as fuck, bordering on being muddy but still possessing just the right amount of bite, and the vocals fall right in line with the music. It's sort of on the dry side, but in the best possible way... there's a ton of depth to the sound, so there isn't one hole to be found. Awesome work. I'm digging the visuals here too, as the colors and lettering and style of the painting are all just awesome. The lyrics are pretty damn sinister and run a range of approaches that are all aesthetically consistent, definitely hitting on some nice runs: "And if the sun never shined on us the nighttime has fruit of the vine, Come with me now and just lie to me, tonight we'll pretend we're alive, Our brother's wind flows on and on..." I swear, this thing shits all over 95% of what's out there that gets tagged as "stoner rock" or whatever. This is not a "stoner rock" album. It's a metal album. And it's god damn great. Get this and realize why most other such bands are suddenly falling way behind. I'm truly blown away. (8/10)
Running time - 53:24, Tracks: 9
[Notable tracks: The Face of Oblivion, Blessed Black Wings, To Cross the Bridge]
Relapse Records - http://www.relapse.com

This review has been displayed 4173 times.