Mastodon at Metro
No related
It’s challenging to take a concept album and turn it into a stage show, but Mastodon has a solution—play it the way it’s meant to be heard. A month after the release of its fourth album, Crack The Skye, the Grammy-nominated quartet—Bränn Dailor (drums), Troy Sanders (bass/vocals), Bill Kelliher (guitar), and Brent Hinds (guitar/vocals)—is playing its new record as a single, fluid piece of music. No breaks, no between-song banter, no flashy stage moves, and no bullshit.
Given that the album is about a paraplegic on an astral projection journey, it was appropriate that the group backed its music with a giant LED screen, continually alternating between images of space and sad black-and-white faces. The group spent most of its near two-hour show playing a note-for-note rendition of Crack The Skye, taking only a five-minute break to play tracks from its back catalog. Each song from the new album bled into the next, barely giving the crowd (predominantly composed of bearded, sweaty dudes) a break from moshing and throwing up finger devil horns. Mastodon didn’t do ballads. They didn’t slow down for a single song. The music was so complex and played at such break-neck speed that the show was overwhelming in its intensity. As one guy behind me said, “Now that’s fucking metal.”
The show proved that Mastodon, now in its tenth year of touring together, is still one of the most technically complex and musically diverse metal groups. Though the show offered the audience little more than the albums cranked up to full volume, it was awe-inspiring to see Hinds’ lightning-fast fingerwork during a lengthy rendition of "The Czar: Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral," sweat dripping constantly off his tattooed face. It was understandable he'd be working so hard, as the group made the seamless transition from traditional metal riffs to math rock to prog/art rock and back again—sometimes all in the same song, like the 13-minute-long “The Last Baron.” After ending with the pulse-pumping "Hearts Alive" (off of the Moby Dick-themed record, Leviathan), Kelliher quietly said, “Thank you Chicago. Until we meet again,” before leaving the stage. These guys don't fuck around.
