High On Fire

Matt Pike sure knows how to keep busy. The singer-guitarist/metal icon has been on the road for the better part of the year, touring first with High On Fire and then with Sleep (his legendarily heavy and recently reunited former band). Never one to be at rest—even between tours and albums, he always seems to be working on something—Pike and company return here behind High On Fire’s latest, this year’s Snakes For The Divine. In a similar vein to 2005’s Steve Albini-produced Blessed Black Wings and 2007’s laudable Death Is This Communion, Snakes is dominated by pummeling, mammoth riffs that conversely maintain a crisp, technical dexterity that is quintessentially Pike.

Updated 10/07/2010