Someone in the High on Fire camp might be taking #13 of my Cardinal Rules of Running a Metal Record Label list a little too seriously. When I suggested labels and bands shouldn’t throw away money on a fancy .com band website I didn’t mean to suggest those sites should be completely neglected for 12 years; I just meant to say that super-pretty designs, deep content and bells and whistles are completely unnecessary. Ya know, just the basics, in case anyone happens to stumble through.

So either High on Fire don’t give two shits about their official website, Matt Pike is taking the piss, or he just got reeeeeeeally stoned and forgot to update it, ’cause the official High on Fire website is like a living shrine to GeoAngelfireTripodCities and hasn’t been updated since 1999 (2002 if you count some tour dates, half of which were cancelled). Check out the website and all of its beautiful, flame-laden animated .gifs before the band gets hip and pulls it down. This kind of old-school Internet gold doesn’t come around too much anymore; even Ace Frehley’s website is roughly up to 2004 standards these days. At least there’s always Waybackmachine.

Thanks to Metal Injection for this ace find.

-VN

I don’t think anyone would actually equate Matt Pike’s recent good-vibe poolside interview to the famous so-sad-it’s-not-even-funny pool interview with W.A.S.P.’s Chris Holmes, but I definitely got flashes of the latter in this highly entertaining clip from Soundwave T.V. For one, Matt Pike seems to generally love life and be stoked on just about everything as opposed to being a pathetic sad-sack, and Pike strikes me as a much more down-to-earth working man than Holmes was. But this is MetalSucks, so you be the judge:

True to form, Pike is even wearing his favorite t-shirt.

-VN

There was something of a tornado here in Brooklyn yesterday, and even if you didn’t see the tornado itself you saw some of the craziest fucking weather ever. I know you folks out in Nebraska are thinking “So what?” but for us something like this happens about as often as an earthquake does for you. Shit was positively epic. Thankfully even the monkeys didn’t get all riled up like the dudes in the above video — although I think I saw Sammy hiding in the bathtub — and business carried on as usual as it did all week:

• We stroked ourselves just a little bit by celebrating our 10,000th post with a list of our top ten favorite posts ever.
• The return of Ask Oderus: You asked Gwar’s frontman your burning questions and he answered them. Also, Eyal wondered what makes a guitarist “great.”
• We premiered new tracks by Titan, Holy Grail, These are They and we premiered the new Firewind video.
• We spoke with Valient Thorr’s Valient Himself.
• Rumpelstiltskin Grinder changed their name to The Devil. Oh wait, no they didn’t.
• We ranked the Top 10 t-shirts worn by High on Fire frontman Matt Pike.
• We looked at new records by Drudkh and Winterfylleth and Skunk Anansie.
• We looked at our favorite new-school Iron Maiden jams and we wondered if Demolisher is the heaviest band on the planet.
• Tomas Haake may or may not have actually commented on my post about some dude covering Meshuggah’s “Bleed” by playing drums on his pillows. Tomas, if you’re reading this, I have mad respect for your drumming!
• Axl released Part 1 of his Daath in-studio report.

Hopefully no more tornados hit Brooklyn this weekend. Actually, if one could swoop right over Jerry Manuel’s home then hop-scotch over to Omar Minaya’s, I’d be OK with that.

-VN

Matt Pike in one of his most awesomest t-shirts, with some dude I don’t know.

So last week Vince and I hit up the Sleep reunion show (read our friend Justina Villanueva’s review at Noisecreep), and as we were watching the mighty Matt Pike, we turned to one another and were all, “Wow, that dude has a lot of awesome t-shirts!” I mean, Vince and I have some pretty extensive t-shirt collections full of all kinds of cool shit, but that Matt Pike… man. I’ve never seen that dude NOT wearing an awesome shirt.

And so, to that end, I now present to you, oh loyal readers, our list of Matt Pike’s top ten t-shirts.

Click to read more…

Yesterday I praised whomever came up with the moniker for The Acacia Strain’s upcoming “To Catch a Predatour” trek with The Red Chord and The Contortionist as a genius; today I know that it was Mr. Vincent Bennett, vocalist for TAS. For the band’s new, David Brodsky-directed video for “The Hills Have Eyes” is a parody of the infamous “news program” that outs kiddie fuckers (or, at least, would-be kiddie fuckers) on camera. And so, Mr. Bennett, I say again: YOU ARE A FRIGGIN’ GENIUS.

My other not-so-deep thought about this video is that it’s a million times better than that one The Malloys made, where Metallica are performing a very poorly written and produced song about a clogged toilet for the inmates of San Quentin. Maybe it’s “cooler” to go film at a real maximum security correctional institution where the inmates might get loose and rape Kirk Hammett at any moment, but Kirk has been getting raped by Hetfield and Ulrich for three decades anyway, so who really gives a shit? I’ll take Matt Pike (not that one, this one) as a reporter over Robert Trujillo droppin’ a deuce any day.

“The Hills Have Eyes” comes offa The Acacia Strain’s latest and greatest, Wormwood, which is out now on Prosthetic.

-AR

Following months of speculation, reunited doom metal gods Sleep have announced a string of dates following their appearance at the All Tomorrow’s Parties festival in upstate New York. I guess someone’s puttin’ up a big stack of bills for Sleep to do this, because all of those dates fall in a row without any days off: in other words, they’ll be flying from show to show and backlining gear. That costs mucho moolah. Between this Sleep reunion and the recent success of High on Fire, it sure is a good year to be Matt Pike (or one of his fans). Neurosis drummer Jason Roeder will be replacing original drummer Chris Hakius on these shows; no exact reason is given for Hakius’ absence. Check out Metal Insider for details about the additional six dates in Philadelphia, New York, Chicago, Austin, Portland and San Francisco.

Meanwhile, following a stellar return to form in their early 2009 release Ox, Lambgoat is reporting that recently reunited post-metallers Coalesce will return to hibernation after a fun-filled two years of recording, releasing not one but two records, and a ton of touring. In a public statement, bassist Nathan Ellis was very careful in his choice of words — “This is a good time for a break,” as in a break, not a break-up — so all you Coalesce freaks out there shouldn’t get your panties up in a bunch. I’m sure they’ll be back at some point. In the meantime the members will be working on their new homes and businesses, finishing their PhDs and lying supine on the couch.

The lord giveth and the lord taketh away. You win some, you lose some. Yin and yang. Sleep and Coalesce.

-VN

In a recent editorial on Invisible Oranges, Cosmo Lee (and yes, it was actually Cosmo who wrote this one… I triple-checked!) used the recent success of High on Fire as a case study to discuss why metal fans hate it when their favorite bands become successful. Cosmo posits three theories and they’re all on point (as usual), but I’ll let you check out Invisible Oranges for that because that’s not really what I’d like to discuss today. I’d like to explore when the fuck High on Fire suddenly became such a big deal.

I’ve never been a huge High on Fire fan, but I haven’t got anything against the band. To me they’ve always been a sweet bonus, that band that’s opening on tour with a bigger, cooler band — “Ah, nice, High on Fire’s on that tour… cool, we get to see Matt Pike rock the fuck out with his shirt off!” — but they didn’t really warrant much attention individually. No doubt, the band has a rich history (hi Sleep) and had a core of die-hard fans, but by and large they lived in the underground. They were always that band that were either a) supporting a bigger band, or b) playing in small, cramped sweaty bars.

There’s a ton of hype around their new album Snakes for the Divine which had a HUGE first week with almost 9k copies sold but, by and large, isn’t all that different from their past work. All of a sudden they’re on the cover of Decibel right out of the gate, with a snake-adorned Matt Pike wearing more makeup than a 50 year-old stripper. And they’re on their own headlining tour of decent-sized legit venues, selling them out across the country. Make no mistake about it; like Cosmo points out, High on Fire are a big band now. They’re in the mainstream metal consciousness.

So when did this sudden transformation happen?

Click to read more…

According to a tip sent in by Suckalo Leanne Fischler, legendary dope smokers Sleep appear to be looking to do a U.S. tour in 2010. The tip comes from a blog announcement on Sleep’s MySpace’s page titled “Booking info,” in which the text simply reads”

“Sleep booking inquiries can be sent to: john@groundcontroltouring.com”

Which would seem to indicate that the band is looking to tour… right? The text sits on top of the above flyer for the band’s appearance at All Tomorrow’s Parties New York, a 3-day festival to be held in upstate New York this coming September. So while it’d be a stretch to say a Sleep tour is definitely happening, it’s certainly not a stretch at all to say it’s quite likely.

I’m not sure whether the ATP appearance was already announced before this blog, but it’d definitely make sense for Sleep to do a bigger tour surrounding their ATP date. It’s worth noting, though, that with a new High on Fire album on the way Matt Pike might have touring commitments to take care of with his main squeeze.

-VN

I’m not entirely sure what a “frost hammer” is – it sounds like the name of a band I wouldn’t like, actually – but it’s apparently the title of a new High on Fire song. You can watch bootleg footage of it being played live below, courtesy Blabbermouth.

Meanwhile, Snakes for the Divine has been announced as the tentative title of HOF’s new album, which will be out on E1 next year. Greg Fidelman, who produced the new Slayer album and worked on Metallica’s Death Mehgnetic, is producing. HOF are doing that whole Dethklok/Mastodon tour right now – if you’ve yet to see Matt Pike shake his flabby shirtless body, definitely go check it out.

-AR