Big-Thinking Band Extracts Metal From a Mountain

“We’re about things of majesty,” said Brann Dailor, drummer of the heavy-metal band Mastodon. He has an energized, curious demeanor, short blond hair, a silver incisor, rings in both earlobes and a chest tattoo that sprouted from the neck of his yellow T-shirt.

“Or monolithic things,” he continued over lunch recently. “A giant whale. Our band name. Grand. Gotta be big.”

“Dragons are cool,” said Brent Hinds, one of the band’s two guitarists, scratching his red chin-beard. “But they’re more mystical. That’s out.”

Mr. Dailor interjected, “It’s not out, but… .”

Photo property of Mastodon

Mr. Hinds reconsidered. “Well, it puts you in a whole different ballgame.”

The band, based in Atlanta, formed in 2000. After pulling its sound together across two records, in 2004 it made “Leviathan,” an album based on passages from Melville’s “Moby-Dick.” Why not? There is little in the world of tales more metal than Ahab raging at the whale. The novel also carried other meanings for the band. Traveling in vans for eight months out of the year, leaving wives and families behind, sleeping four hours a night and hitting the stage still hung over, the four musicians in the band began to feel like sailors before the steam age. And smell like them, as they are quick to point out.

Heavy-metal fans gravitate toward a certain kind of sublimity, to use the term Edmund Burke defined in his book “A Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful.” Published in 1757, it was the last word on the subject in its time; Melville owned a copy. Burke’s notions about the sublime — which he seemed to prefer to the beautiful — could be a checklist of heavy-metal qualities: darkness, largeness, incomprehensibility, repetition, things conducive to loneliness and terror. Thus “Moby-Dick.”

 

Thus Black Sabbath. Thus “Leviathan”: in Mr. Hinds’s explanation, the album was about “the struggle between man and music,” a metaphor about holding together as a band through endless one-nighters. (What was the whale? That’s harder to say: the idea was of a band questing after some elusive liberation through music, something that might not even exist.) And thus Mastodon’s new record, “Blood Mountain,” which Warner Brother will release tomorrow.

This record is about climbing a dangerous mountain, which seems like a ready-made metaphor for holding on to yourself as you grow more popular. With this album, Mastodon has jumped to a major label from the independent label Relapse, which sold about 100,000 copies of “Leviathan.”

But there’s more to it. “I went to Peru recently,” Mr. Dailor said, “and they used to worship the mountain there, because it was the biggest thing in front of them. They were like, that’s God right there; I can see it. It’s something you can dig into, put your hands into it.”

Photo property of Mastodon

Basing a record on a loose story line, Mr. Dailor said, is a good way to get around precisely what can make metal boring: the cliché of generalized dread. (Also, it’s a tradition: Iron Maiden, among others, did it.) “A mountain is something to overcome, to conquer,” Mr. Dailor said. “But it’s also a way not to be so literal and to invite some fantasy in, rather than saying, ‘I’m upset because this or that happened to me.’ ”

This time the story line is land beasts. In the lyrics, one encounters a sasquatch with a Cyclops eye, called a Cysquatch. (You hear him on one track: it is Mr. Dailor, his voice distorted by a ring modulator.) A tribe of birch-tree men patrols a forest near the mountaintop. Blood-sucking flies are involved. Deep in the mountain is the Grail-like Crystal Skull, whose magical powers the traveler especially needs at the summit because there is an angry Ice God up there.

The story ideas, as well as the riffs, came together jointly: “Blood Mountain” is a strong record by a powerful band nearing an ideal of cohesion. In a concert at Webster Hall on Friday — to an integrated crowd of indie-rock kids and middle-aged metal fans — it was sometimes hard to tell who was doing what. Mr. Hinds and Bill Kelliher, the band’s other guitarist, often played their long, complex lines in unison, and the singing passed back and forth during songs between Mr. Hinds and the bassist-singer, Troy Sanders.

Thus Black Sabbath. Thus “Leviathan”: in Mr. Hinds’s explanation, the album was about “the struggle between man and music,” a metaphor about holding together as a band through endless one-nighters. (What was the whale? That’s harder to say: the idea was of a band questing after some elusive liberation through music, something that might not even exist.) And thus Mastodon’s new record, “Blood Mountain,” which Warner Brother will release tomorrow.

This record is about climbing a dangerous mountain, which seems like a ready-made metaphor for holding on to yourself as you grow more popular. With this album, Mastodon has jumped to a major label from the independent label Relapse, which sold about 100,000 copies of “Leviathan.”

But there’s more to it. “I went to Peru recently,” Mr. Dailor said, “and they used to worship the mountain there, because it was the biggest thing in front of them. They were like, that’s God right there; I can see it. It’s something you can dig into, put your hands into it.”

Basing a record on a loose story line, Mr. Dailor said, is a good way to get around precisely what can make metal boring: the cliché of generalized dread. (Also, it’s a tradition: Iron Maiden, among others, did it.) “A mountain is something to overcome, to conquer,” Mr. Dailor said. “But it’s also a way not to be so literal and to invite some fantasy in, rather than saying, ‘I’m upset because this or that happened to me.’ ”

This time the story line is land beasts. In the lyrics, one encounters a sasquatch with a Cyclops eye, called a Cysquatch. (You hear him on one track: it is Mr. Dailor, his voice distorted by a ring modulator.) A tribe of birch-tree men patrols a forest near the mountaintop. Blood-sucking flies are involved. Deep in the mountain is the Grail-like Crystal Skull, whose magical powers the traveler especially needs at the summit because there is an angry Ice God up there.

Brann Dailor

The story ideas, as well as the riffs, came together jointly: “Blood Mountain” is a strong record by a powerful band nearing an ideal of cohesion. In a concert at Webster Hall on Friday — to an integrated crowd of indie-rock kids and middle-aged metal fans — it was sometimes hard to tell who was doing what. Mr. Hinds and Bill Kelliher, the band’s other guitarist, often played their long, complex lines in unison, and the singing passed back and forth during songs between Mr. Hinds and the bassist-singer, Troy Sanders.

Mr. Dailor can play very complicated fills, redolent of jazz-rock drummers like Billy Cobham and Bill Bruford; as he’s finishing one, he likes to spill over into the first beat of the next bar. Mr. Hinds, originally from Birmingham, Ala., is a metal-riff player who happens to love the 1950’s jazz-country instrumental records by Speedy West and Jimmy Bryant. You can hear that in his increasingly ornate style, as in the solo on the new record’s “Capillarian Crest,” which involves a series of ringing open strings while a swarm of fretted, hammer-on and pull-off notes are popping around them.

Mastodon has progressive-rock tendencies — members of the band worship records like Pink Floyd’s “Animals” and Genesis’s “Lamb Lies Down on Broadway” — but manage to exercise them without playing coldly; when the songs shift metrically from four to three to seven, or from a medium groove into hyperspeed, they’re nice, greasy segues, recorded without studio edits. And the band doesn’t get ahead of itself. The basic unit of metal is the concise riff, and “Blood Mountain” has lots of those.

What Mastodon lacks is a singer with a recognizable voice, which is the sort of thing that can make a metal band actually popular. (Both singers get the complicated imagery across mostly through roaring and barking.) But this might not matter. Warner Brothers signed Mastodon in the hopes of pointing it at indie-rock audiences as well, and the band will have to hang on to its credibility.

“If we get in there and infiltrate,” Mr. Dailor said, “we can maybe start to change things. If we get away from preaching to the choir, maybe then there’s a chance that kids will go into their bedrooms and learn ‘Capillarian Crest.’ I mean, think of King Crimson, Rush, Yes. Those bands thrived in the 70’s.”

Mr. Hinds, on his second beer, was less optimistic. “I don’t know how viable we are for the kids,” he drawled. “We’re more a grown man’s type of music.”

Source: http://www.nytimes.com/2006/09/11/arts/music/11mast.html?pagewanted=1&_r=1&ref=music

 

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