Mastodon’s 2009 album Crack The Skye remains one of the greatest metal albums of the 2000s. And, as Metal Hammer found out when we caught up with the band at a release gig in their hometown of Atlanta, it was a cathartic experience for more than one band member.
“This song is about killing children and masturbating on their grrraaaves…!”
It’s late afternoon in the guts of Atlanta, Georgia’s cavernous Masquerade venue on the first and only day of the Scion Rock Fest, and right now Warbringer are gods who walk the stage, leering over a neck-snapping pit and evidently as oblivious to social taboo as they are to just how distant their red-blooded, hilariously overblown blasts of thrash classicism are from the other bands on the bill here, among them Converge, Wolves In The Throne Room, Baroness, Boris, Pig Destroyer, High On Fire, Withered, Torche, Kylesa, Neurosis and the latter’s mutant children Mastodon.
More than a bill, it’s a veritable who’s-who of groups who – in different ways – are each on the bleeding edge, the avant-garde, the spear-point of heavy music. Some are veterans. Later tonight hardcore deities Converge will utterly annihilate a sweaty room so packed that security will begin turning people away. Others, like Baroness, are relatively new on the scene, bringing with them a fresh injection of angular, genre-dissolving lifesblood that, while defying easy classification, is undeniably heavy-as- shit.
But mostly, tonight is about co-headliners Neurosis and Mastodon; spiritual all-fathers and sons – fringe-dwelling lunatics who, while cut from the same heavy cloth as their trad-metal contemporaries, have brought in their own exotic weaves: prog sensibilities, angular riffs – all the vestments of an ever-growing cult that, while boasting a worldwide audience, has never poked its head above the surface of mainstream awareness. That may be about to change, because Mastodon are on the cusp of releasing their fourth album, Crack The Skye – produced by none other than Atlanta local Brendan O’Brien, immediately following his work on AC/DC’s million-selling opus Black Ice. Yeah, that guy.
It’s not an observation lost on Mastodon, or at least by the three of them who’ve spent the last hour shuffling in and out of a dingy backstage trailer. Drummer Brann Dailor, guitarist Bill Keliher, and singing bassist Troy Sanders seem to wince slightly at the mention of lead guitarist Brent Hinds. Their headlining, hometown gig is just three hours away, and the ginger-maned guitar hero is nowhere to be seen, and ‘Where the fuck is Brent?’ seems to be the mantra of the day. Rumours that he tore a fingernail off have surfaced. Add to that a horrific soundcheck the night before in which Mastodon’s monitors seem to be unworkable, and you’d be forgiven for thinking this is an inauspicious live debut of Mastodon’s newest, space-faring epic Crack The Skye.
Forget the legion of American music industry denizens who’ve descended from New York and LA to witness it. The by-road behind the stage is teeming with band friends, wives, daughters and parents, and it’s also a family affair of a different kind. The presence of Neurosis, Mastodon’s creative starting point and close personal friends of the band, are casting a long shadow on the day’s proceedings. Tonight Mastodon are planning a nearly two-hour set, the longest they’ve ever attempted, and weather predictions promise a shit-kicker of a snowstorm, boding poorly for the band’s outside stage. Not to worry. It’s not like this is the first time in five months that Bill Keliher will play with the band since a bout of pancreatitis waylaid him in a squalid East London hospital for three weeks following his second Hammersmith show with Slayer on Halloween night last year. Oh, wait, yeah, it is.
Bill confesses that even with upcoming dates supporting Metallica looming, it’s playing next to Neurosis tonight that truly fills him with dread. No, they don’t want to fuck it up in front of their friends and family, but it’s really their peers and inspirations in the audience they’re worried about.
“Jeez,” says Brent, casting his arms between his legs. “Those guys are good friends but we’re here because of them and we want them to see how far we’ve come, not go, ‘We spanked you!’”
“They truly paved the way for us,” agrees Troy, clutching a stack of lyric sheets, with Sleeping Giant off 2006’s Leviathan on top. “They’re still as powerful as ever and incredibly inspiring to a major degree. I’ve always believed that 25 or whatever bands are sailing on the same ship. We’re not racing each other to a watery horizon. If something happens that’s good to one band, it benefits everyone…”
“A show like this solidifies the fact that the scene that exists,” continues Brann. “It’s been bubbling under the surface for a long time. I think a lot of American metal comes directly from Testament and thrash, and pulls exactly from Reign In Blood and Pantera, and here we are coming from Amphetamine Reptile and Alternative Tentacles, but the noise aspect is there too. When we first started out it was all gutter punks and squatters coming to see us, there’s a punk mindset and sensibility, DIY…”
If you are detecting a snobbery there – an art-house look-down- the-nose at metal’s more traditional offshoots – you’re mistaken. Just as Crack The Skye is possessed of an otherworldy beauty, a sophisticated grace and harmony overriding the torrent of rhythmic collisions underneath, Brann sees Mastodon’s efforts as equally owing to the thrash bands of yore… with a twist.
“I wasn’t born some fucking virtuoso,” says the wire-framed drummer, possibly aware of his reputation as one of the most exhilarating sticksmen on the planet. “I had pictures of Lars on my wall. I started playing young but when I was 13 I played Metallica, I couldn’t play Rush. It was all For Whom The Bell Tolls. Everybody wants to talk shit about Metallica’s musical choices but how many world-changing records do you need to make to get some respect? The thing is, Metallica were a really beauty and the beast kind of band, and I think a lot of bands took the beast part only but that beauty element was there too. They had Orion and Fade To Black, those classical harmonies. A lot of bands just heard Battery…
“We’ll be fine playing with Metallica, no pressure,” says Bill, sounding like he’s having trouble believing the words himself. “But tonight is really special for us and we had a really bad soundcheck last night and it’s weighing very heavily on my mind. I don’t want it to be a bad experience. People are like, ‘You’re opening for Metallica?’ A show is a show. If the monitors suck it doesn’t change anything, that’s a dealbreaker. You’re playing in front of five people or 20,000, if the monitors are bad and you can’t hear anything. Brann, I think someone has to have a quiet word about those monitors, I think we need to do something about it right away... my Dad is here, you know?”
“Yeah,” says Brann. “Fuck, I couldn’t even sleep last night.”
A battered clock ticks over – two hours to go. The tension in the room is immense, the silence unbearable. Troy gets up to pace outside, silently reciting lyrics to the darkening sky. Probably the time to ask, uh, where’s Brent?
“Fuck if I know. That’s just the guy that Brent is,” says Bill, rolling his eyes. “It’s been that way forever.”
If you know anything about Crack The Skye, you’ll probably know three things. It’s a concept album about astral projection, Rasputin, and Russian cults. Query Mastodon about it, and they’ll insist it’s a ‘three, no four, no… six-dimensional record’ that isn’t just ambitious in melody but also in the layered nature of its lyrical meanings.
“Ask Brent – he’s the drug addict,” says Brann with a laugh when pressed, but then while Brent has been the primary songwriter and vocalist on the record, adding his falsetto twang to Thin Lizzy-loving proceedings usually occupied by Troy’s gravel-spitting wail, Brann’s still the group’s lyricist, and Crack The Skye bears a story far deeper than any abstract flight of conceptual fancy.
As Bill says of the music: “We wanted to make something that, 20 years down the line, represents the time, that we can sit down and play for the dudes in Pink Floyd and think they might find it listenable. Dark Side Of The Moon, Kill ’Em All… when you want to be in that mood it’s like, ‘There’s that record, it’ll rock my world.’”
But push past melodies so dense they seem to bend space and time around them, and read between the lines of lyrics so abstract and at times nonsensical that they seem like a madman’s stream of consciousness, and you’ll find something deeper still. Look closely and you’ll notice ‘Skye’ is tattooed on Brann’s neck, which is the name of his sister who committed suicide when she was 14 years old. That she shares a name with the new album’s title isn’t the sort of observation you just dive into, or for that matter, choose to immortalise on a record for the entire world to see. The room stops when the subject is broached, understandably. Still, the question remains…
“Yeah I’m close to regretting doing that, but not yet,” he says, cracking an uneasy smile. “My sister Skye’s suicide is something I’ve been dealing with for 20 years. I wanted to lift her up and put her name out there forever. It doesn’t go away. It isn’t a cathartic thing for me.”
He’ll explain how that tragic event has overshadowed every aspect of his musical career as well as his life, how it’s a subject he’s always returned to but only now has found the strength and clarity to confront artistically
“It was the most deeply emotional moment of my life, and always with suicide there’s a lot of guilt that comes with it. The whole story is my metaphor for if I’d been able to come in and pick her up and save her from that situation, so yeah it’s a sad thing but I don’t want it to be this pity party for me. Everybody experiences loss. At some point in your life you will lose someone near and dear to you and I’m lucky enough to have some kind of artistic platform to immortalise it, to have some kind of tribute. We owe it as artists to come from the deepest place possible; that’s art. But it’s hard to talk about what happened all the time now…”
He trails off, and suddenly Mastodon seem an altogether heavier band than anyone ever suspected.
“I’m sooo sorreeeee…” It’s an hour to stage time and Brent Hinds, with what you’d be forgiven for thinking were pillow-creases in his face, has just materialised outside, and is hugging Troy Sander’s genuine, gentle giant of a father. He looks like a kid next to him, and it’s remarkable how all he needs to do is give you a belly-rub and immediately break into a story about how he figured out how to suck his own cock by lying on his back, lifting his legs over his head, and getting his girlfriend to sit on his ass for you to forgive him.
The rest of the band just grin at him as if to say, ‘You asshole’, and you get the sense this happens all the time, even if he did have them going for awhile. Just then Neurosis come on, their bass-heavy distortion coming in immense waves of intensity, like an ethereal giant striding the Earth in zero gravity. It sets a couple of car-alarms off outside, and Brann bolts to check them out on the side of the stage.
“Yeah, I was out with Matt Pike,” says Brent. “You can’t get him and me together, we’ll just drink each other to stupidness and punch each other in the face,” he says. “That’s how much we love each other, it’s that kind of brotherly love.”
Brent’s alone now, fresh from hobnobbing outside with the alien wail of Neurosis’s set going on and seemingly unfazed by the imminence of the show, and you begin to wonder whether the band’s core songwriter – the man at the heart of already-classic anthems like March Of The Fire Ants and Blood And Thunder – is really beneath the skin of this apparent prankster.
“Man, that sleep was one of the best sleeps I’ve ever had in my whole life,” he says, not referring to this evening but the three-day coma he endured after coming to blows with System Of A Down bassist Shavo Odadijan following an MTV event in Las Vegas. “I was the happiest person ever when I was asleep before, it was just one of the best experiences. I loved it. I flew beyond the sun, I drank so much that day and I was in another dimension. The only time I’m ever serious is when I play for this band, the only time in my life.”
Speaking with Brent is a relatively rare event. Despite his creative centrality in Mastodon he’s often in the shadows, preferring to allow his bandmates to do the talking. Do you recoil from the limelight?
“Yeah, but then this time they went, ‘Brent, it’s because you’re at the microphone, you jackass, stop being a dick and talk to them.’ When the band started getting popular they were taking Troy’s face and plastering it everywhere and we were like, ‘What the fuck is that? That’s bullshit! Most of the music doesn’t come from Troy. Most of the music comes from me, but even if they wanted to put my face bigger I’d be like, ‘No, you can’t do that.’”
It’s hard not to wonder whether he was the shy kid at school, one that still lives in the skin of a 36-year-old man with, it has to be said, tattoos on his face.
“Oh no,” says the Alabama native, smiling. “If all of this stuff would have happened in my 20s I would have been a much bigger phenomenon, I was a total hellion, heroin addict, son of a bitch from hell in my 20s. Hopping freight trains, living the hobo lifestyle, no job. Oh yeah, I trained it all up and down from Alabama to Texas and to Portland to California and back to Texas then New Orleans. There’s nothing else to do when you’re 22 and a heroin addict and you don’t give a fuck about nothing.”
He throws it in there with the nonchalance of someone who’s just confessed to liking a bit of telly.
“You don’t know it’s dangerous when you’re a dumbass kid shooting up drugs. Me and two other guys made it out alive, all the others are dead or in prison. I was doing it for a couple of years, from 22 to 24, and I met the Mastodon guys at 25, so I put the heroin needle down and I’ve been jamming with them ever since.”
It was being in Mastodon that worked as Brent’s rehab, owing to the band’s resistance to having a junkie in a band. Brent struggled through it, being honoured to play with the erstwhile members of volume-demolitionists Today Is The Day, Brann and Bill. But despite his contributions, he never truly stepped up to the mantle of being a frontman, allowing Troy Sanders to occupy centre stage, resigning himself to being set in his ways. It wasn’t until the band set to work on what would become Crack The Skye that he took a more commanding role within the bad. Not to say he was bossy, just that he discovered a confidence within himself that he hadn’t possessed before. As he says, he was like: “’I’ve got all this shit, I’ve got too much music inside of me, what are you going to do with it?’”
“It took 10 years of playing this type of music to be that familiar with the guitar so I could open my mouth and sing like that. The album is all reminiscent of stuff I’ve done in the past… Elephant Man, Pendulous Skin, these songs are heavy progressive rock. Nothing has ever changed, it wasn’t the incident, it’s just that’s how I write music. I’m not capable of writing heavy metal music because I’m not a metalhead but I do write heavy riffs, and I want and paint with all those colours. I get more licks, more knowledge. I wish those guys had let me take more control earlier, that way we would have been here back then, but I don’t want any prima donnas in the band bossing everyone around. And if those guys met me in my early 20s it wouldn’t have happened and it wouldn’t have worked,”
“When we first formed I was doing drugs and a nomad, not knowing what I was going to do with my life, but I knew that I could play guitar so I always hoped I would do that. Back then I could fuck up an anvil with a cotton swab. I never came close! I had one blue-out, I fucking shot up too much good dope and woke up in a friend’s bathtub two days later, I was like, ‘What happened?’ He was like, ‘Dude, you died on us.’ I just remember doing the dope, feeling so good…”
So that coma after Vegas wasn’t the first time you…
“Look, this album is special in two ways because we’re only going to talk about these things that happened to us one time,” he says, interrupting and sounding a little rowled. “These things that happened to me and Brann were very fucking devastating to us but in terms of the record there’s no way we could reach a higher ground, because lyrically there’s no way we could be sincere twice about it.”
He explains that it was that coma – and confronting his mortality in an unambiguous way – that was transformative, not just in his approach toward the music but also in the way that he regards himself, and those around him.
“I realise more than anything else that the world does not revolve around myself, it takes a lot of people to let you be yourself. When you’re getting fucked up all the time you’re being selfish. I’ve been that dude several times but I’m also the dude realising that it isn’t fair, I’ve learned to curb my behaviour. Back then? Oh dude I was like, ‘Fuck this shit, I’m gonna be dead when I’m 30… fuck this shithole… fuck this shit… fuck the world, I’m outta here.’ I’ve learned a little more patience, trying to get a little more guidance, just trying to help out more. It’s about beauty and love. That’s all there is.”
It’s now showtime. Neurosis have just utterly hypnotised two thousand black-clad devotees. A menacing swathe of purplish clouds are rolling in over the city’s distant skyline, and the setting sun has turned everyone here into shadows. And then, loudly, jarringly, it begins. Bill seems at home on stage, a solid-as-a-rock rhythmic right-hand to Troy Sanders’ bellowing wails. Anthems roll past, the crowd throws shapes and horns and bows its head convulsively to these waves of distortion and beauty, of inelegant harmonies, that weirdly seem to defy any of the band’s worries spawned at soundcheck the night before.
Brent is a behemoth, throwing his southern twanged-guitar riffs out at the crowd, the expression on his face reading pain and rapture as Brann plays staring only at the ceiling, ostensibly entranced by the exertion of it all. It’s impressive, concussive, but overwhelmingly it’s also beautiful. Neurosis frontman Scott Kelly joins them for a set-ending Crack The Skye and exchanges hugs with the band in the way you’d expect a team of mountain climbers to do upon reaching the summit. This moment will not be surpassed, but it’s hampered by a rumble of storm clouds in the distance. With enough beer in you, transfixed by these extra-dimensional tunes, it’s easy to catch yourself thinking that they really have cracked the sky.
Originally published in Metal Hammer issue 190
