This was a one-off show (no other High on Fire shows around this) that was billed as the "Seattle Tattoo Expo After Party". The Sword had come up and played the same venue the night before as the after-party for this with Brothers of the Sonic Cloth.
I showed up at 9 PM and the first band, Deadkill, was slated to start at 9:30 PM. There is a pretty large bar/drinking area in the level above the stage at Neumos, but you can still hear everything really well up there, so I headed up and got a stool and took in the remainder of the Red Sox/M's game.
When I finally heard Deadkill play from upstairs, it was apparent they really weren't my thing at all. "Rah-rah" style of hardcore. Weird band to put on this bill of otherwise brutal, crazy, riff-based metal.
I definitely headed down to see local prog-metal masters Lesbian. I'm very familiar with all of the Lesbian albums and from what I could tell, they just played a single, new song over their allotted 45 minute set. It was pretty damn cool, over that time, they must have changed things up between 15-20 times. They're like Deathspell Omega if they were hippie stoner dudes instead of French satanists, or YES as conducted by Cthulu. Subterranian, serptentine and heavy! They had really won over the locals too, definitely the most people I've ever seen them play in front of. The whole room was full, probably 300-400? Definitely a good crowd.
The mighty High on Fire were up next, with the room getting steadily more packed/drunk. A fun show as always and they are consumate/old pros at this point. I'm always amazed at how badass Des Kensel is. Good setlist, they opened with Blood from Zion, Frosthammer, Devilution and then went into two or three tracks from the last two album(s). After that they played Speed Wolf and Hung, Drawn and Quartered (which seemingly baffled about 80% of the crowd), which were the highlights of the show for me. Then came Rumors of War, Fireface and they closed with Snakes for the Divine. I'm not as into the more anthemic stuff of their mid-period, I want to see Matt RIFF, but that last song in particular (Snakes) really does a great job of melding their trademark sound with a catchy chorus (RISE UP, FALL DOWN) and was a great way to close the evening. It was cool to see them headline a room the size of Neumo's with a crowd completely behind them. They've done it the right way and will always be one of my all-time favorite bands. Still a hell of a lot of fun live to boot, but different than the early off-the-rails dive bar shows.
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