High on Fire's Matt Pike stands, his back ramrod straight, one foot on the monitor, with his guitar held out before him. He has long hair, a scraggly beard, and no shirt on. Why no shirt? Because there's just no way to play this music fully clothed, unless it's while wearing the skin of your enemies.

There's a teeth-grinding look of joy on his face as he plays, and he plays with the ability and demented ecstasy of someone touched by God. That is the only explanation.

It is outrageously loud, so loud you can forget about the fake-ass vintage van rock that passes for stoner metal these days and submit to the hair-blowing caterwaul coming from the giant Green amps placed on either side of the stage. The rhythm section acts as a single unit – they even look alike – laying out the patterns for Pike to alternately ride on top of and drive to the perimeter of the Justice League's sweaty, smelly room. Halfway through the 10-minute beatdown from High on Fire's new album, Surrounded by Thieves, called "Thraft of Canaan," the action swells and throbs, and riding over a thrumming drumbeat, Pike growls, "I'm high on fire. Your head is searing. Give with pain all thy hearing," before returning to the deafening main riff. My friends had to leave.

High on Fire is the outlet for aggression/Yeti poems Pike uses in place of his defunct first band, Sleep, San Jose's most seminal export. For those who never heard Sleep, think of the initial stirrings of stoner metal: the sonic equivalent of primordial ooze but with stickier, more purple buds. Sleep's slumbering fuzz riffs and perfectly buried vocals were far and away the best slow-doom Sabbath-isms generated by the whole stoner rock movement. If that description isn't enough to illustrate the vital nature of Pike's former band, I submit for your approval such brilliant lyrical moments as "Choir of the sun chants inside the anti moon," which makes sense when you're high; "Ride the dragon toward the crimson eye / Flap the wings under Mars red sky," from "Dragonaut," which is featured prominently in Gummo; and, for their once-future major-label debut, Jerusalem (a single 52-minute track that inspired London Records to drop the band posthaste), "Follow the smoke to the riff-filled land / Drop out of life with bong in hand," which is just plain good advice. Anyway, you get the idea.

Sleep is the archetype after which all bands that want to practice the rites of stoner metal should model themselves. Unfortunately, most bands model themselves after that logo-rock Fu Manchu bullshit, so what you get is a potentially interesting genre of rock music that can seem deader than dead. Last Thursday's set at the Justice League was proof that it's not in fact lifeless. High on Fire had an inexplicable presence in the room even before the amplifiers were turned on. Once the band started playing, that presence, combined with Pike's utter dedication to the guitar and the songs themselves, made the show a kind of transcendent experience. Pike's belief in Gnostic Christianity – a belief that salvation can only be achieved through knowledge of and communication with the spirit world, a view that may be undetectable in his songwriting but cannot be missed when watching him play – is part of the equation. You can find some connections to Freemasonry, as well as to shadowy wars with the Vatican. It's a world composed of Templar Knights, Foucault's Pendulum, Philip K. Dick, conspiracies, Rosetta Stones, and all that cool creepy old mystical Christianity stuff that got lost somewhere along the way. Anyway, that's what the guy is into, and it works for him.