High on Fire - Death Is This Communion (Relapse)
3/5
By: Charlie Potter
The first thing that sticks out about Death Is This Communion is just how completely relentless it is. The songs are all quite long and repetitive, but somehow they manage to keep an energy and a tension to them at all times. It would be a perverse and difficult thing to mimic this music on a computer, as with most bands it seems important that there is some human energy there, but it seems particularly important on this album. You really don't get the impression that this band get at all bored putting everything they have into this music, the whole group seem to just push out a consistent pulse of energy that comes in waves of velocity.
This velocity seems to be the key to a very mature tension of rhythm that somehow makes the relentlessness constantly exciting. Even on a more clean, stripped back track, High on Fire still have so much energy bubbling away underneath this music. I am aware that a lot of what I'm saying has been said about a lot of bands before, but with this band it's much less general and much more definite. The way they seem to keep the tension whilst still going all out constantly is really impressive, not to mention unusual.
I once saw this band with Joe Preston (Thrones, ex-Melvins, ex- Earth and occasional Sunn0))) collaborator) playing bass at ATP. ATP is probably my favourite festival, but there is sometimes a slight climate of intellectual restrain present at it which can be sometimes good, sometimes bad. Seeing four people out on stage not so much pummelling out but more hammering it out was fantastic, and I have never seen a heavy rock band behave in such a way - just standing out at the front of the stage projecting strength, looking out at the audience unashamedly acting more as a force of nature than an apology for their own neuroses.
It would be silly to deny the obvious Motorhead-like sound of the band particularly in the vocalists husk. To me this is quite a welcome revival and possible place to come for people that know that Lemmy is not going to make any good music any time soon. Yet a band can't just be all conviction and no substance. Apart from the rhythmic dynamism that I mentioned earlier, High on Fire also have some really good melodies - its particularly the guitar resolves that seem to add to this the most. For my liking indeed this probably doesn't happen quite often enough.
Although it is fantastic how the band operate as one solid unit all the time, this doesn't leave the band much scope for really pulling something curious out of the bag, and indeed the only time you're offered anything in the way of an interesting juxtaposition is when the vocals kick in, which it has to be said are often providing really rather good melodies, but still the occasional musical interplay between the musicians may not break up the wall of sound quite as much as these guys may think. It might make it even more effective, if anything.
I still think this is an incredible album, one that does what it does better than any other record trying the same thing. Alas, the fix you get from listening to it is a very particular one, and thus this CD belongs on my shelf rather than glued to my CD player. But when it is to be taken from the shelf on one of those strange nights when you think, 'Ha! I know what I want to listen to...' I know that nothing else could take its place.
Stream 'Rumors of War' from 'Death Is This Communion' HERE.
Artists in this article: High on Fire
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