Welcome to Drumming Upstream! I’m learning how to play every song I’ve ever Liked on Spotify on drums and writing about each song as I go. When I’ve learned them all I will delete my Spotify account in a blaze of glory. Only 438 songs to go!
This week I wrote about “Cometh Down Hessian” by underground metal icons High on Fire, who, for better and worse, represent the dead-center of heavy metal culture. In this entry I’ll explain how and why High on Fire came to occupy this role, and why “Cometh Down Hessian” took me over a year to learn on drums (short version: I goofed). To read this entry along with the rest of the Drumming Upstreams archive, subscribe now for only $5 a month!
Side A
“Cometh Down Hessian”
By High on Fire
Blessed Black Wings
Released on February 1st, 2005
Liked on July 6th, 2015
In DU#21 when I wrote about Iron Maiden’s “Hallowed Be Thy Name”, the current reigning champ on the Drumming Upstream Leaderboard, I concluded by considering what makes heavy metal heavy. I think I gave a pretty good answer:
“A metal song has an insistent rhythm, usually powered by a chugging low-to-mid range instrument, is in a minor key, and is either directly about or deeply informed by the specter of death”.
I stand by that definition, but even as I wrote it I knew that it could only ever be the second best description of the essence of metal. The best description is one I know well, almost by heart, and it captures the soul of the genre far more accurately than my stuffy musicology. Here it is in full, as delivered by its author, Matt Pike:
“Heavy? Heavy’s about… being pissed off and being warlord. And laying down… like if someone is in battle and they chop some dude in the head, and it landed, and you play a riff that’s the same way that way… that’s heavy.”
A more pure distillation of the simple pleasures and brutal poetry of heavy metal has yet to pass through human lips. Whenever I watch this clip the only response I can summon is “lmao, hell yeah”, which not coincidentally is the same response I have when I hear a great heavy metal song for the first or 100th time. It’s the same reaction I had when the final, perfect riff of “Cometh Down Hessian” kicked in on July 6th, 2015 seconds before I Liked the song on Spotify. The riff was pissed off, it made me feel like a warlord, and it did play the same way, THAT way, that a human skull decapitated by an axe might upon hitting the ground.
Part of the reason that Pike’s definition rings so true is that Pike speaks from a position of first hand experience. By the time that he was asked to define heaviness for the documentary Such Hawks Such Hounds (2008) Matt Pike had contributed enough heavy metal to the world to rebuild the MTA from scratch, first as the guitarist of Sleep and then as the frontman of High on Fire. Across his 30 year career Pike has embodied a cartoonishly exaggerated image of the heavy metal lifer; long haired, perpetually shirtless and prominently tattooed, wielding an ungodly racket from a wall of amplifiers down on an audience of adoring fans. If Matt Pike did not exist, American heavy metal would have to invent him.
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