High on Fire
We do not yet know what makes metal heavy. The music itself was invented by accident, by people who demonstrably did not know what they were doing and had no idea what it would turn into. The classic rock bio Hammer of the Gods reveals that Led Zeppelin thought they were playing folk music. They compared themselves to delicate eccentrics like Dr. Strangely Strange, but they’re remembered today as a rampant sonic phallus. In the bat-biting apology video Don’t Blame Me, Ozzy Osbourne testifies that Black Sabbath were just a blues band disgusted and ultimately confused by the Summer of Love. In retrospect they’ve become the 70s’ best inducement to take downs, kill cats, and submit to Satan’s prong. What was going on here? Sabbath and Zeppelin do share things: drugs, self-pity, a compulsion to flog the living fuck out of the blues. But they had those in common with James Taylor.
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It’s no accident that the writers who first “got” metal were heavily mook-identified and dug incoherence. Robert Christgau, the “dean” of American rock criticism, had an obsession with the visceral that was whiningly cerebral: he took pains to remind you that you could, and indeed really ought to, get down to this rock ‘n’ roll stuff. He made fun itself into a strenuous type of upper-middle-class self-actualization. But Christgau’s writing never evoked a physical connection to his person, other than the rumors that he only had one nut. His opposite number, the fat, sloppy Lester Bangs, ass whacked on cough syrup, actually wrote like a fat, sloppy guy with his ass whacked on cough syrup. Smelling bad was an aspect of his literary style. Guess which one dug Black Sabbath?
I know why “The Prophet” is as close to God as a rock song can get, but I’m not sure if that helps with the question at hand. The heart of Volcanic Rock is a particular cognitive trick that’s not unique to metal. As musician and writer J. Niimi Web-logged recently about a much more avant-garde song, Bailter Space’s tonal firebomb “X,” that one note is the hook. The miracle lies in a musical effect you can find equally in James Brown, Sleep, or Arnold Dreyblatt: a single beat or pitch spun into a whole song. The trick linking funk, metal, and avant-garde drones together is when the riff is actually the same all the way through, forcing you to watch how you progress as the song remains the same. You’re mesmerized, more aware of being alive. But is that metal?
Their second album, Surrounded by Thieves, opens with a minute-long bass rumble that comes closer and closer until the entire band, acting as a single rhythm instrument, jumps up and tramples you. A song like “Speedwolf” takes an elaborate rhythm that would be labeled “progressive” if it were slower or cleaner and pumps it to the gills with crank: you wouldn’t dream of asking what a “speedwolf” is for fear you might miss a beat and get bitten. The guitar solos on their first album, The Art of Self Defense, sounded like melodies being wrung out of strings about to break; on Surrounded, the melody’s gone and they twist like snapped power lines. “Razorhoof” flickers between a waltz-time lope and a 4/4 gallop: the whole album evokes the feeling of being chased. It ends with the drums veering higher and higher into the red until they cut out sounding exactly like the guitar, and you’re torn between wanting to stand back and get closer. If it were a rotting log instead of a compact disc it could not feel more primitive. Except if a snake crawled out. The lyrics don’t read like Conan the Barbarian novels so much as notes for a Conan the Barbarian novel, written in a trance: “Ancient relic reveals secrets. Transform human beyond mortal. Learnt forboding, sacred tempest. Up to their bridles in blood.”
