keith

High On Fire's press release describes their sound as "Motrhead meets Slayer," which is actually a pretty good indication of what to expect when you put on their new album, Blessed Black Wings, which opens with the roaring "Devilution" like a latter-day Ace of Spades. Produced by the legendary Steve Albini, Blessed Back Wings surprises by not finding the band's sound all that changed by his presence. Albini's hand has merely brought High On Fire's powerful, passionate playing into clearer view after the deliberately muddy, stoner sound of their previous releases and singer/guitarist Matt Pike's work with his former band, Sleep:

Keith Daniels: Hello?

Matt Pike: Is Keith there?

KD: This is him.

MP: Hey Keith, this is Matt from High On Fire.

KD: Hey! How you doing?

MP: Oh, I'm alright, man. How are you?

KD: [Laughs] Not bad. I'm actually kind of nervous. You're the first metal band I've ever interviewed.

MP: Oh, that's alright. It's easy. I do this all the time.

KD: It's funny. I guess, since the election, I've been getting into heavier music. I always considered myself a peaceful guy, but now when I see a car with a Bush sticker I want to light it on fire.

MP: Yeah. Molotov it. I understand. It's funny how militance breeds militance. That was the first time I ever voted in my life, because I thought it mattered... and it still didn't matter.

KD: Yeah. I didn't think Kerry was so great, but he wasn't Bush.

MP: Anybody but. The lesser of two evils was still cooler.

KD: Are you still in Utah?

MP: We're in Nevada, but my phone seems to be doing alright.

KD: You going to stop in Reno?

MP: We're making a beeline home.

KD: A little break from after the tour?

MP: Sort of. Everybody else has a break. Basically, what I'm doing is going to Europe and then coming back, and going on tour again. I've got to do all this shit in the next couple of days real fast.

KD: But you're not going with High On Fire?

MP: No, I'm going to see my girlfriend graduate.

KD: Where from?

MP: Oxford.

KD: Dude.

MP: Yeah.

KD: Obviously, the big news on this record is that you worked with Steve Albini. Were you a fan of his work with Neurosis?

MP: Oh yeah, totally. That's what turned us onto him. I liked a bunch of the recordings he did, and so did Des. We were just tripping out. "Should we use this dude? Should we ask this dude if he wants to do it?" It turned out that he'd heard of us, and it worked out [pretty well].

KD: What did you want from him? People tend to go to him with a specific goal in mind.

MP: Yeah. I wanted it to be crisp and in your face, in the speakers, like closer up. We were talking about making it less canyon-y and boomy, and a little more realistic sounding. I don't know how to explain it. Kind of... real brilliant and ambient.

KD: So you wanted the high end to stick out a bit more.

MP: Yeah. Well, not so much the high end. Um... [Laughs] It explains itself. Do you have the two recordings?

KD: Yeah.

MP: You can hear the difference in the way things are. Not that the way it was before was bad, we were just trying something new. Taking a stab in the dark, if you will.

[KD: Billy Anderson, that you'd worked with before, worked with you on almost everything you ever did. Was it nerve-wracking working without him? Did you feel like you were missing something?

MP: Oh yeah, Billy. It was definitely different. I'd got so comfortable working with Billy for so long that... I don't know. It was nothing against Billy, either. Billy is killer, he's great at recording heavy music. It was weird doing it without Bill, but Albini made us pretty comfortable.

KD: And you actually did this record in about seven days?

MP: Ten. All the tracks took about seven days, then about three days mixing it.

KD: Did you have everything written when you went in?

MP: Oh yeah. Well, there was one song that we wrote in there.

KD: This record was the first of yours that I'd heard, and then I went backwards and listened to the others. I noticed that, on this one, you start straight out of the gate with this hardcore... one of the fastest songs on the record, "Devilution". Did you really want to kick people in the ass right from the start?

MP: Yeah, with the arrangement of it, totally. It is like that. We were just all, "Yeah, it's got to be a floodgate right off the bat."

KD: It's been three years since Surrounded By Thieves came out...

MP: Yeah, I know, which is way too long. I don't plan on going that long without releasing another one again.

KD: What happened?

MP: I don't know. We were just touring on the last one a lot, and we just kept touring and touring and didn't take any time to write.

KD: So you don't tend to write on the road.

MP: It's really hard to, because you're in a van all day. It shakes around, and there's not room -- everybody's in close quarters. I don't get a lot of time by myself, or just with Des, to think about things like that. I write a lot of lyrics, but not necessarily music itself.

KD: One of the things I like about your band, is that ever since I've started to get into heavy music, my friends have been handing me records, and a lot of them sound like I need a degree in musicology or mathematics to really appreciate them. Your record, though, has a feel that's like Motrhead, just fucking rocks.

MP: Well, yeah! We try to make it really good songwriting -- intricate to the point where musicians will enjoy it, with time changes and stuff, but being a three-piece... We're trying to make it, not necessarily simplistic, but just really good songwriting, the way it's put together.

KD: You've mentioned in interviews, back in the day when you did Jerusalem [with Sleep], that you had a bunch of charts of mathematics, and plotted it all out. With High On Fire, were you looking to be more spontaneous?

MP: To a degree, yeah. Just have some [Laughs] normality to it. It got a little overboard in Sleep.

KD: What have you been listening to on the road?

MP: Actually, nothing much. I haven't had a CD player in this U-Haul. I've been listening to the radio stations, like talk radio or something, if that.

KD: That'll poison your mind, man. Talk radio, I mean.

MP: Some of it's not. You'd be amazed. There's a bunch of weird shit that you get out in the middle of nowhere.

KD: [Laughs] You have an accent that reminds me of... an Indian, Native American, accent. Where you from?

MP: Well, I grew up in Denver, and I got shipped here, I don't know, twelve or thirteen years ago, to the Bay Area. It's been a while. I was 17. I'm 32 now.

KD: The last person I talked to with a similar accent was Dick Dale, that's what it made me think of.

MP: Well, I have a lot of friends that are Indians, so that's kind of weird. I get along with every Indian I meet. They end up being my best friends and shit.

KD: I saw some recent pictures of you, and it looks like you've got some new tattoos on your right arm, and the right side of your chest.

MP: Oh yeah, yeah. I've been having some work done. Speaking of Indians, my friend Sonyu's [sp] been tattooing me. My friend Adam did some work on me. My friend Dan did some work on me. It's just time to get some more tattoos.

KD: Have you got them filled in yet?

MP: Some of them, yeah. I have to finish this one on my ribs.

KD: What's your favorite?

MP: I don't know, I like 'em all. They all remind me of a different moment in my life. That's kind of why I get 'em.

KD: Where you were, or something specific about the art?

MP: Kind of both. Where I was at with my life, you know.

KD: My wife and I were talking yesterday about "the Devil in movies", what our favorite portrayal of the Devil in a film was. My answer was Tim Curry in Legend.

MP: Ohhh, he is a wicked [Devil]. He's killer in that; awesome. He's fucking bad looking, definitely.

KD: What would you say?

MP: I hate to say it, because Keanu Reeves was in it, but I liked Al Pacino's in... I forget the name of it.

KD: Devil's Advocate?

MP: Yeah, yeah, yeah. I liked Al Pacino in that. He's fucking crazy. Then... I don't know. There's so many different ones. That's a weird one, I'll have to think about it for a while, [and then] be like, "Oh yeah!"

KD: Would you say that the Devil is literal, or metaphorical? Is there literally some force that exists, that is the Devil, or is it a side that everyone has?

MP: A side everybody has, or an evil spirit? I don't know. I don't think anybody has an answer to that.

KD: You've mentioned that you like to play practical jokes on the bands that you tour with.

MP: Oh yeah, we love doing that. We haven't been so bad. We're not as ruthless as we were at some point[s], but yeah.

KD: What's one that stands out?

MP: Oh God, there's one where we saved up all our dirty underwear, and put it all in Joey's kick-drum when his drum-head was off. There's a hole cut in it, and they couldn't figure out why the crowd was thinning every time he'd kick the drum... this wet...

KD: [Laughs] Ass.

MP: It was horrible, dude. Totally funny. Then, that same band, we were coming from Boston, going to New York, and we put "The Red Sox suck, the Mets rule" on their van. [The Red Sox and the Mets] were in the fucking [World] Series together, and they almost got ran off the road by a couple of people, and people were like fucking flippin' 'em off and starting shit with them, and they didn't know why. [Laughs] It was funny.

KD: I really like the cover art on this record, by Eric Roper, who also did the cover for The Art of Self Defense. I read an interview with him where he mentioned that he'd known you since like '91, through Buzzoven. I was wondering how you'd kept in touch all these years, and what made you go back to him for this record.

MP: Yeah, he was doing that Buzzoven cover, and we all stayed at his house. Yeah, I've known him for a long time. I just love his artwork. I think he's awesome. He's a crazy painter-illustrator.

KD: What are you thinking about when you write lyrics? Do you have any philosophy regarding them?

MP: I don't know. Tour life, the tragedy of my life, in terms of... books I've read, any sort of inspiration I can get about a theme. I just go off of... usually it has something to do with literal and metaphorical, and I kind of combine them. Like, all the fantasy, sci-fi, in it, usually it has some sort of literal meaning, too.

KD: I don't remember what song, but something I read of yours reminded me of some books I've been reading, the Illuminatus trilogy.

MP: Oh yeah, yeah. "Devilution" is kind of about that.

KD: Illuminati, conspiracy theory, and all that?

MP: Yeah, completely. Except I don't think it's just a theory. I think it's an honest world domination organization.

KD: [Phone connection ominously terminated, he calls back]

MP: I think it's self explanatory. We're running out of cocaine and oil, so where do we go? We go to the Middle East. I think it's a conspiracy of bankers, politicians, the media, it's the most powerful people in the world, that have a hold on society, and fucking run society. They control society the way they see fit. There's a few people that fall out of the category, that aren't sheep, that tend to think for themselves. So many people don't know what's going on, and can't think for themselves, because they believe everything the TV tells them. The TV-baby generation thing.

KD: What's disturbing to me is that, lately, they don't even try to hide it anymore. It's out in the open, and yet, if you told somebody, they wouldn't believe you.

MP: Oh, I know. It's completely fucking... I don't know how they're getting way with it. It's amazing.

KD: So is there any hope, or should we just hang on for the ride?

MP: I'd say "hang on for the ride". [Laughs] It's going to get worse before it gets better.

KD: But you do think it will get better at some point?

MP: Oh yeah. There'll come a point when this Earth, or God, or whatever, just cleans this fuckin' place right out. I have that feeling. I don't hope it, but then I do, at the same time, y'know? I have some pretty macabre beliefs about that.

KD: Reminds me of Deniro in Taxi Driver. "Some day a rain's going to come and wash all the scum into the gutter."

MP: Yeah, it's kind of like that.

KD: So what's next? After you get back from Europe?

MP: We do a Northwest tour. We're going up to Portland, Olympia, and Seattle. Then we head to Europe at the end of the month, and then I don't know. We have some shit up in the air that we're still negotiating.

KD: Have you even started thinking about the next record yet?

MP: I've got some riffs in the vault. Me and Des have some stuff that we haven't developed yet. Hopefully Joe can help write some more songs on this one, because [this time] it was kind of like, "Here's some songs, learn 'em dude!" So he had a real small time to write his basslines. I'm hoping he's got some extra stuff to bring to the table the next time, and can help us write and arrange this next album.

Blessed Black Wings by High On Fire is in stores now. Check HighOnFire.com for tour dates and more info.