It’s been a little over a quarter century since High on Fire emerged in Oakland, California from the cooling magma of celebrated stoner/doom metal outfit, Sleep, a band known for its nearly hour-long paean to marijuana (“Dopesmoker”), as well as for touring with Nik Turner’s Hawkwind and having music used in films by directors Harmony Korine (“Gummo”) and Jim Jarmusch (“Broken Flowers”), among others.
From its earliest shows, High on Fire had the same murderous guitar tone and banging riffs, but with more mid-tempo songs and plenty more notes courtesy of Matt Pike, the guitarist and singer whose constantly sliding, serpentine playing on classic early songs like “Baghdad” and “10,000 Years” made him sound like the heir apparent of Black Sabbath’s Tony Iommi, the guy who invented the blueprint. It didn’t hurt that Pike’s raw, whiskey-scoured vocals brought to mind another British rock legend, Lemmy Kilmister from Motorhead. (Shown below, HOF’s debut album, “The Art of Self Defense” recently got a new remix and remastered release which provides a startling improvement in clarity.)
Even though High on Fire won a Grammy for best metal performance roughly five years ago, the band hasn’t mellowed a bit. If anything, it’s gotten more aggressive, releasing one pummeling album after another, including their ninth and latest, “Cometh the Storm.” Arriving last month, the Kurt Ballou-produced album not only features some new Turkish music influence on several tracks, but it marks the debut of the trio’s new drummer, Coady Willis, who some will know from his other groups, Murder City Devils and Big Business (who came through Richmond a few years ago), in addition to working with the Melvins.
One thing that has changed these days is that Pike is a sober, middle-aged diabetic, according to interviews, who still partakes in the herb and who with shorter hair appears to resemble James Hetfield of Metallica a little. To Pike’s fans, he’s a modern metal guitar hero who absorbed his classic influences and built on them, writing and recording nearly 200 songs over the past two decades. HOF has played Richmond many times, including this early Alley Katz show preserved on YouTube.
Due to a last-minute scheduling conflict with Pike, Style wound up chatting via Zoom with the band’s rhythm section of longtime bassist Jeff Matz, whose interest in Turkish music is manifested on the new album, and new drummer Coady Willis. High on Fire plays the Broadberry on Wednesday, May 8 with High Command (thrash metal from Worcester) and Zeta, experimental punk fusion from Venezuela; see videos of both bands after the Q&A.
Style Weekly: Did the two of you originally meet on the Zeke/Murder City Devils tour way back when? I think I saw that back in Chico in the ’90s.
Coady Willis: Yeah, well, we had played some shows before.
Jeff Matz: For myself, Coady was definitely at the top of the [drummer] list. We had a couple other buddies play with us in the interim. I wasn’t sure if Coady would be available or he’d even be interested. So I just talked to Matt about it, then called him up and asked him to jam with us. Luckily, he said yes.
How big a change was it for you, Coady, coming into this band?
Coady: It’s funny, when Jeff called me, I was working on a recording with Jared [Warren] from Big Business and we were just finishing up. When that band started in 2003, we had a van with a CD player and a shoebox of CDs, and one was [HOF’s] “Surrounded by Thieves.” I listened to that so many times on tour, we were fans pretty early on.
Also when I was playing with the Melvins, we did a tour with High on Fire, so I knew what to expect, I guess. I was familiar with their music … [Former longtime HOF drummer] Des [Kensel] has a very distinctive style. It was just a matter of walking around in his shoes a little bit. I feel like we come from different places in terms of our influences, but it was really cool to learn that stuff and fall into that groove. It was a new area for me, outside of my comfort zone, but really fun to play. I like all those songs.
But it was a lot to learn in a short matter of time, because we had a show a couple weeks after I said ‘yes,’ so it was a crash course … Really, it’s a different feel and I had to get locked in. With High on Fire, some songs are very on top and you’re one the one, on top of it all the time, and other songs are laid back. Des did that really well. The genre of metal is a little more regimented and less groovy. It’s almost an anti-groove (laughs). More relentless, not as loping, like drilling a constant barrage.
Did having Coady in the group reinvigorate the band?
Jeff: Definitely. Even just doing the tours with him and hearing his take on the existing material was fun and exciting. He brought a lot of energy to those songs. It’s always interesting when playing with a different drummer, because they’re such an integral driving force in a band like High on Fire. Coady’s style came from more of a rock place and Des had his roots in East Coast hardcore and classic metal like Judas Priest, Motorhead kind of thing.
Coady: If I could interject a second, I have to say, all those things are true. But one thing that was cool about Des, he also had this unique, weird, laid-back style in the middle of all of that. Some of his accents, the way he plays his fills, there’s this dragging, laid-back quality even though everything is always on time. Which was one of the things I always liked about him, that stoner element is laced in there; some of his fills are groovy.
Jeff: Definitely, he has a unique swagger, just the way he plays … It’s kind of an interesting melding of his influences with what Matt was bringing in the early days, which was more in the direction of stuff he was doing with Sleep.
Where do you guys see this new album in terms of the band’s catalogue?
Jeff: To me, some of the material definitely hearkens back to the early days in that a lot of it is in a slower, heavier direction and mid-tempo stuff. The last few albums we’ve done have leaned heavily into the faster, Slayer-style tempo. So it’s really cool to get back to some slower, heavier things. And I think a lot of that is when we’re writing music, certain ideas tend to come to fruition more easily than others, and that tends to form the body of the group of songs. I think working with Coady had a huge influence in terms of how he responds to the riffs we throw out there, and how those things grow and get developed into songs. But in terms of how it fits into the catalogue, it definitely has some newer stuff as well.
Which leads me to the Turkish influence on here, that’s something original and new that mostly came from Jeff, right?
Jeff: Yeah, so Middle Eastern folk music is something I’ve been interested in since I joined High on Fire. A buddy of ours turned me onto a lot of Persian, Arabic, Turkish, some Indian classical music. Stuff I had heard before in certain contexts, but didn’t really know much about. The Turkish music, in particular, really drew me in. I’ve been listening and dabbling in it since 2006, but in 2019 I made a decision to take it more seriously and learn the nuts and bolts of it, learn some of the traditional repertoire and techniques. So yeah, I found a music teacher in Istanbul that offered online lessons and took classes from him on the bağlama, the Turkish traditional string instrument that I play. All through the pandemic, I had a lot of time to do things like take lessons … sometimes I would take three to four a week, with him and other teachers I found. So it’s been a passion of mine for a while that’s really flourished into an obsession.
On this album, it’s mostly heard on the instrumental song, “Karanlike Yol”?
Jeff: Yeah, my goal with that was to create a piece of music that sounded like a traditional Turkish folk dance mixed with High on Fire. That song is the most obvious example, but even down to the riffs on certain [other] songs that I contributed, like for example, the opening track, “Lambsbread,” the chorus and bridge riff of that is definitely informed by my Turkish music studies … the scales, the way the melodies are crafted, certain melodic and rhythmic movements …
Coady: Jeff sent me a couple reference tracks for “Karanlike Yol.” I was up in Vancouver practicing and I just tried with what I had on hand to provide a pulse. Obviously, the star of the show is the baglama and everything with that, and you’re trying to build this pulse beneath it. It took a while to figure out a groove that had a texture to it, and a wave for everything to ride on. It’s supposed to cruise under the surface. As we went along, Jeff had a lot of great ideas – it’s probably the most layered track on the record. Lot of percussion, handclaps, bass overdubs and synth overdubs.
Jeff: Yeah, I’m really happy with the way it turned out, it feels like a special piece of music.
Many of the new songs are as hard-hitting as ever. As you get older, how do take care of yourselves on the road to keep playing these kind of physically demanding songs?
Jeff: You want to answer that, Coady?
Coady: (Laughs) I just a got a personal trainer. Over the course of the pandemic, I definitely had to reevaluate a lot of things. I had about three years to think about my life and the choices I made through it. Even before this started, I decided to quit drinking. I’m getting up there too, I turn 50 this year and have been playing music actively for the better part of 35 years. And I want to keep doing this as long as I can, in the best way possible. So my physical program and maintenance has been a little more forward in my awareness than it has been in the past. When you’re in your 20s and early 30s, you can drink your face off and party through tour, but now I have to put a little care into the chassis (laughs).
That said, having done this music for a long time, I’m used to it. Every different band I play in, the physicality is totally different, whether Murder City or Melvins or High on Fire. That first week of tour, you’re hitting the songs hard and your body goes through an adjustment period. After three of four shows, it calms down. The first few shows you’re sore, than the body adjusts.
High on Fire performs with Zeta and High Command on Wednesday, May 8 at the Broadberry. Tickets are available here.
