Oh hell yeah. Total axe-swinging Conan The Barbarian: The Musical type Tolkien-core that got past its essential ridiculousness years ago and just decided to get on with banging heads together until World’s End. Whilst not immediately seeming like the obvious choice for producer, Steve Albini proves to be completely and utterly apt. Getting Bob Rock in to polish the bollocks off it would have been the worst thing they could have done; much better to hire someone who keeps it raw and ready, warts and all, blood, sweat, tears squeezed out from every pore, because that is what High On Fire are all about. A pure, cathartic barrage of noise, with monolithic riffs pulverised until they can take no more, although they like to educate the heshers by stealth, wrapping their sonic experimentalism (sudden time-changes, near-jazz phrasing) in sheer crowd-pleasing rock actions.
Although opener ‘Devilution’ snags you from the outset with its blatant and beautiful amalgamation of Slayer and Motorhead, what makes you keep coming back for more is the fact that this is far from a shallow rock-out. There’s far more interplay between light and dark than on previous efforts, making the introspective passages seem more delicate, and the heavy bits even more earth-shattering. In amongst the loudness is real soul too, perhaps not in the effortless league of something like The Hidden Hand, but it’s more than evident in a song like ‘Brothers In The Wind’, which probably features the most deliberately melodic vocal line Matt Pike has bestowed upon us yet. Also: Joe Preston on bass = automatic gold star.