HIGH ON FIRE POLISHES ITS METAL WEAPONRY

[From the SF Weekly.]

Oakland's (and possibly Earth's) heaviest band, High on Fire, is ready for its close-up. The trio's fifth studio album, Snakes for the Divine, is its first for the E1 label after several years on highly regarded metal imprint Relapse. The musicians also worked with a real producer for the first time in years.

On Snakes, the band's sound was shaped by Greg Fidelmann, who has worked on such high-profile metal discs as Metallica's Death Magnetic and Slayer's World Painted Blood. "He's actually a producer producer," says guitarist and vocalist Matt Pike, contrasting Fidelmann with Steve Albini and Jack Endino, who worked on 2005's Blessed Black Wings and 2007's Death Is This Communion respectively. "Greg's a lot more hands-on."

The result is High on Fire's cleanest, most accessible album to date. Of course, the members keep their trademarks. Pike's vocals are a hoarse roar somewhere between Motörhead's Lemmy and the Melvins' Buzz Osborne with throat polyps, and the rhythm section of bassist Jeff Matz and drummer Des Kensel thunders like an avalanche. But each instrument occupies its own space, with room for subtle ornamentation. And Pike's guitar, one of the fiercest and most punishing axes in modern metal, has moments of surprising clarity. Indeed, from the album's first few moments, it's obvious this is a new stage in High on Fire's evolution — even if the title track begins with a high-pitched, buzzing riff that's naggingly similar to AC/DC's "Thunderstruck."

Pike laughs and owns up to the borrowing. "Not intentionally, but yeah, I kinda lifted a little bit of that," he says. "I thought it was so cool, and it's such a fun thing to play."

For the rest of its eight-minute running time, the song is a vintage High on Fire gallop, riffs landing like body blows from a 9-foot-tall steroid abuser. The album is jammed with the band's longest and most punishing songs (five pass the six-minute mark, and two run more than eight minutes). It also offers greater variation from the High on Fire crew. "How Dark We Pray" and "Bastard Samurai" are slower than anything the band has recorded since its 2000 debut, The Art of Self-Defense. "Every now and then it's good to slow down some," Pike acknowledges. "Jeff and I had a really wide span of tempos."

Pike is busy preparing for the band's first headlining U.S. tour in several years. "The way our management and booking agents are, they want us opening constantly," he says genially. Indeed, the group has been the first act of choice on Megadeth's 2008 Gigantour outing and on the recent Dethklok and Mastodon co-headlining tour, but Pike would like the chance to play for an hour straight for a change.

He'd also like to play fresh material this time out. "I'm two-thirds of the way through learning all of 'em so I can play and sing 'em live," he says of the new songs. "We're still working out the quirks. But by the time March rolls around, I'm pretty confident everybody will have their end of things in order."

ANSWERING THE CALL

Randomly came across the "call for papers" notice for this conference via a Twitter link, and decided to quickly whip up a proposal. If they keep to the same setup as last year, it'll be held in San Francisco in October or thereabouts. Of course, I haven't got the budget for a plane ticket and/or hotel stay in SF, so if they pick my paper, I'm gonna have to try and talk them into letting me deliver it via Skype or something (they'll probably dig that, being as how it's a technofetishist gathering anyway - whadda I need to be there in the flesh for, right?).

So here's the first and only draft of what I sent:

BLOWING YOUR LOAD AT WORK: THE OFFICE SHOOTING SPREE AS SEXUAL METAPHOR

Looked at correctly, architecture is innately, irrefutably feminine. Just as when you really think about it, the person who physically surrounds and contains the other person during sexual intercourse is in fact the dominant partner, for all its spires and obelisks architecture is ultimately about men creating hollow spaces into which they can crawl like cowards, returning to the womb rather than facing the terrors of a vast and uncaring, if not predatory, world. But that which provides safety and reassurance can become cancerous – familiarity breeds contempt, and all that.

The modern office building and the rituals of corporate life conducted within it, from the panopticon-like surveillance conducted by bosses who monitor employees’ Internet activity and read their emails to the de-sexualization of interpersonal relationships within the office (hitting on one’s co-workers is seen as “creating a hostile work environment,” thus redefining sexuality as a form of hostility), all build up to create a sort of emasculating energy-field. And the familiarity of returning to the same corner of the same building day after day exacerbates that emasculation. Male resistance to this constant smothering pressure takes many forms – the forwarding of lewd or disturbing video clips to co-workers (I worked with a man who had a library of hundreds of these), flirtation with sexually available officemates or, in extreme cases, viewing of pornography and/or masturbating behind one’s closed office door.

In his book Super-Cannes, J.G. Ballard describes an exclusive, upscale colony where corporate heads live in close proximity to one another. The pressures of their jobs are so extreme, the distortion of innate drives by the demands of business so overwhelming, that a therapist embarks on an experimental program of behavioral readjustment, getting them to release pent-up tensions in orgies of sex and violence. Viewed through a suitably Ballardian psychic filter, it seems obvious that the ultimate manifestation of long-pent-up sexual release in corporate culture is the office-park shooting spree.

The image is deeply familiar to Americans – an unassuming employee is fired and leaves the office, only to return with one or more guns and begin blasting holes in co-workers, literally penetrating them in a manner that mimics/“makes up for” all the more traditional forms of sexual acting-out that have been systematically excised from corporate life. While this has traditionally been the province of male workers, we have recently seen the first female office shooter, showing that this type of behavior has crossed gender lines and truly become a part of Americans’ psychosexual DNA.

I propose a paper in which I will analyze office shooting sprees as a metaphor for too-long-denied sexual impulses, in much the way J.G. Ballard used car accidents as a metaphor in Crash.

ANOTHER GREEN WORLD (AND ANOTHER, AND ANOTHER)

Fascinating clip reel by a company that does green screen work for...well, it seems like every TV show currently on the air.

I THOUGHT THE RECORD BUSINESS WAS DYING...

Here's a list of everything I got in today's mail:

Avsky, Scorn (Moribund)
Blood Cult, We Are the Cult of the Plains (Moribund)
Bury Tomorrow, Portraits (Artery/Razor & Tie)
Jorrit Dijkstra, Pillow Circles (Clean Feed)
Elephant9, Walk the Nile (Rune Grammofon)
Amir Elsaffar/Hafez Modirzadeh, Radif Suite (Pi)
Scott Fields Ensemble, Fugu (Clean Feed)
Fight the Big Bull, All is Gladness in the Kingdom (Clean Feed)
Kirk Knuffke, Amnesia Brown (Clean Feed)
Sei Miguel, Esfingico (Clean Feed)
Marc Mommaas, Landmarc (Sunnyside)
Red Trio, s/t (Clean Feed)
Mike Reed's People, Places & Things, Stories and Negotiations (482 Music)
Daniel Bernard Roumain, Woodbox: Beats & Balladry (Thirsty Ear)
Second Hand, Death May Be Your Santa Claus (Sunbeam)
Second Hand, Chillum (Sunbeam)
Andrew Thomas, Between Buildings and Trees (Kompakt)
Prins Thomas, s/t (Full Pupp)
The Ullmann/Swell 4, News? No News! (Jazzwerkstatt)
Various Artists, 2010 (Dial/Kompakt)

ANITA TIJOUX

Here's the title track from the full-length debut by Chilean rapper Anita Tijoux:



And here she is doing a guest verse on Julieta Venegas's "Eres Para Mi":