High on Fire
Luminiferous

THE REVIEW

It must have gone more or less like this...

4:00 PM. The alarm rings. Matt gives it a scornful look and silences it with a fart. Then he gets up, heads towards the bathroom while his right hand explores his cheese-flavored pelvic humors. He sniffs them. Enters, yells, huffs, yawns, and burps simultaneously. He starts peeing. A little splash even makes it inside the toilet. It's breakfast time; Des and Jeff are strumming a tune in the kitchen...

"What the hell happened!! What's with all this order??"

"You got back from the clinic yesterday and we thought you'd like to find it a little cleaner..."

"Puuuaaahhh...who's the blockhead who put milk in my gin-coffee?"

"But you heard the doctor...everything that has strength must be elimin..."

"Proooooooooot"

"What what?! Now I'm really getting upset...where did my sacred mountain of joints go? Eh??"

"You must be strong, Matt, the first few days are the hardest...here, take...put on your health shirt..."

"A shirt? A SHIRT??? Enough, this is too much! So gentlemen...throw these stoner/folk apocalyptic riffs that smell of elephant mush with a metastasized duodenum down the toilet and get yourselves into the recording room! And the first one I see with a water bottle in hand, I'll make them listen to The Book of Souls backward rearranged for strings and harpsichord sung by Gazosa! Do you understand?"

They pissed off Matt Pike. They pushed him towards a healthy life, physical activity, Danny Trejo-style mustaches, grandma's bloomers. Maybe even to take a shower once a week, but many still have serious doubts about that. ("Why should I wash? I'm fine like this." "Yes, but you sweat and then you smell." "Exactly, the problem isn't mine. Lower the earth's temperature yourself if you don't like it...")

They pissed off Matt Pike. And "Luminiferous" is what results. Furious fuzz along the spine, screams of pitecanthropes in opioid withdrawal, distorters exploding with no restraint, hammering rhythms that leave an impression like a stream of hydrochloric acid.

An hour of beating on the walnut of the neck.

Not that in the past they were kisses on the buttocks, mind you, but try listening to the epileptic sequence "Carcosa/The Sunless Years/Slave the Hive" without slipping into the kitchen for a carafe of Danacol. I couldn't. When the kyussian breezes of "The Cave" (what a piece) hit, you realize something's off, only to discover Matt was out on the balcony emptying the ashtray below (oh, Des, how do you take the clean off this damn pedalboard? Hurry, he's coming back...come on, come on...he'll catch us, he'll caaaaaaatch us....") and already from the Sodom-style sonic assault of the title track, the gums start bleeding again.

Matt Pike (even and especially detoxed) doesn't tolerate states of quiet. His raison d'être has been and will always be to embody the black Caliph, the shady figure impossible to banish from the "metal-violent-shave-this-damn-beard" imagination (although undeniably peripheral), good for shooting the breeze at night and maybe, come on, see each other next Friday knowing that, in the end, whatever. Listening to HoF in 2015 makes you recall the last time it really happened, taking stock of metal and concluding that, in the end, bands like the Californians (increasingly fewer and inevitably less presentable) keep the flag flying of a genre that today stands in music a bit like Veltroni's documentaries stand in the socio-cultural enrichment of international cinema.

Because we live in an age where the worst bastards get photographed posing with horns and tongues out. If you go into Mediaworld or Esselunga, you can find loads of shirts of hip groups and jackets adorned with logos of fake bands. The streets are full of kids with cobalt blue bangs and Black Flag shirts whose last headbanging was during the solo of "Urlando Contro il Cielo."

The world is a colossal mess. The halt to sweat is looming. Matt Pike is the panacea.