The Wolf Is Loose

The first time I heard of Mastodon I was sitting in my apartment in Salt Lake City, Utah on a ratty pull out couch I had bought at a goodwill store for $10 reading Life Sucks Die magazine. A metal-head all my life, I was, at that moment, coming to grips with the fact that Reinventing the Steel was probably going to be Pantera’s last album. To fill the void, I had slowly started to wade into underground hip hop- Cannibal Ox’s The Cold Vein is a timeless classic of that era btdubbs. I began to wonder whether my metal days were winding down (these were life’s big questions to me at that point).

LSD typically reviewed hip hop acts but occasionally tossed in some random fare. I remember the author writing about how “chuffed” he was by the Viking-like ferocity of Mastodon’s Lifesblood EP. A glimmer of hope stirred in my iron-maiden mind. My interest piqued, I ran around the corner and ordered the EP from a local record shop. I was hooked from first listen.

The opening track of Lifesblood, Shadows that Move, opens with a sample from One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest- one of my favorite movies and one of my favorite lines in that movie. Patient Harding starts ranting: I'm not just talking about my wife, I'm talking about my LIFE, I can't seem to get that through to you. I'm not just talking about one person, I'm talking about everybody. I'm talking about form. I'm talking about content. I'm talking about interrelationships. I'm talking about God, the devil, Hell, Heaven. Do you understand... FINALLY? And then right at FINALLY Mastodon hits you with this mountain of sound like a whirling dervish all fists and elbows. A chill ran up my spine- I knew right then that my metal days were far from over. I must have listened to Lifesblood twenty times that first day. It was raw and angry yet purposeful; this was a cerebral band. The problem with a lot of metal acts, whatever the genre, is that their aggression is unfocused. This leads to a smattering of great riffs and vocals but with an ultimately empty feel. No one could ever accuse Mastodon of being devoid of feel.

After an anxious wait I was blown away by Mastodon’s full-length follow-up album- Remission. In fact I have a t-shirt from the Remission tour with an exploding pink horse on it that remains my single favorite article of clothing despite all the shit I get when I wear it. Though Remission is considered by most to be Mastodon’s only non-concept album it is nonetheless a work of art. The further cohesion of the band can clearly be heard in Remission’s transformed sound. Lost was some of the primal grit of Lifesblood. But this was more than made up for by the increased clarity of the album. More importantly is the focus that Mastodon placed on wistful guitar solos- the end of Ol’e Nessie being a prime example. It is this wistful and melancholic thread, woven throughout Mastodon’s albums that has hooked me as a fan for life.

Over time, Mastodon’s jams have morphed from downcast to something reminiscent of what I think deep space travel would feel like. In fact, when asked about how Mastodon’s most recent album, Crack the Skye came about bassist Troy Sanders said “we kinda strapped on our aeroshells and departed from Earth for a while, and then captained to the ethereal element of the universe and kind of slept on the roof of the world for a while to get a perspective on this record.” Admittedly that line gives me a tinge of lame chills for its new agey/pseudo-philosophicalness BUT the music saves the day. Crack the Skye is fraught with guitar-laden departures that can only be described as extra-terrestrial.

I could go on ad nauseam about Mastodon’s subsequent epics Leviathan, Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye (and hope to do so in a future post) but this particular diatribe is starting to feel tome-like. Real quick though, these three albums began Mastodon’s elemental ‘concept album’ phase. Leviathan, the water album, is based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, with song titles like “I am Ahab,” “Seabeast,” (I defy you to keep from nodding your head to this) and “Iron Tusk.” Blood Mountain, representing the Earth element, is about a man searching for the crystal skull in order to place it on top of Blood Mountain so that his reptilian brain can be removed allowing him to achieve the next step in human evolution. And finally, if you thought it couldn’t get any more bizarre, there is Mastodon’s most recent album Crack the Skye. In a review on Pitchfork.com Tom Breihan declared that with CTS, Mastodon’s concepts are officially “out of control.” Breihan best summarized the album plot as “a record about a kid who experiments with astral travel and then goes through a wormhole and meets Rasputin and Rasputin enters his body to escape assassination, or something.” Yeah.

The bottom line is that Mastodon IS COMING TO TOWN! They will be playing the Palace Theatre in Greensburg on April 26, 2010 with Baroness (another amazing group from Georgia), Between the Buried and Me and Valient Thorr. Don’t Sleep on this Giant of a show.