Alto Tiempo

Three tracks into the new High On Fire album, De Vermis Mysteriis, something wonderful happens. After Des Kensal's mid-paced tattoo has rolled round a few times, without warning Matt Pike's guitar scythes in, the drums hang suspended for a heartbeat or two, and then... Fuck... I mean FUCK, there are riffs, there are High On Fire riffs, and then there's this. This song, Fertile Green, is everything HOF have threatened to be, a time-threshing relativistic switchback, hurtling unstoppably through the Metalverse, dragging and ripping space in it's wake. Take Devilution's time-bent riffery, ally it to Silver Back's outright fucking ferocity*, stir in a touch of that 'bars as long as the breath required' thing that you'd normally associate more with Conference Of The Birds/Pilgrimage-era Om than this Mach 10 dragster, add one of Mr Pike's most unhinged solos for a quite some time and you have this, an actual goddamn future fucking classic. Now go bang yr head.



*This LP is more in the Blessed Black Wings mould than the last couple. I am most definitely not complaining.