High On Fire: Middle East Downstairs, 4/7/10 (Boston Phoenix)

Ok, let’s get it out of the way first: the merch was lacking. Lacking! When I go to see High On Fire, I expect to see, I dunno, hoodies with blue dragon-demons perched on snowy ledges and shit — but even the stepped-up attention the band is getting due to their absolutely smoking new platter Snakes for the Divine (E1) isn’t translating into an uptick in stoner fantasy merch. Bummer!

Oh, the music? Obviously, the band slayed. High On Fire strode onto the Mid East stage like phantom warlords, picking up their axes and instantly bludgeoning us with “Frost Hammer.” In the low-ceilinged confines of the Mid East down, the mix was muddy and claustrophobic: it was probably one of the worst-sounding shows I’ve seen since … uh, the last time I saw High On Fire at the Mid East down. But fuck it: Matt Pike’s guitar sound is going to come across as sludgy and incoherent even if he had scientists re-calibrating the attenuation of the entire room and rebuilding the sound system out of crystal lasers. After a few songs, he cranked the knobs on his Soldano stack, and it was as if our ears were being coated with green slime.

On record, HoF can come across as relentless and one-dimensional, with everything running at full blast at all times. Live, they are no different, but there is something about being in the presence of such a bonecrushing steamroller that makes the unstopping carnage so appealing. Normally, this would be the part of the review where I would point out things like “The band’s set leaned heavily on their new album” or something to that effect, but please: after being liquified by four or five of their epic tracks in a row, it was hard for my mind to get around to remembering things like song titles and what album is this from and that sort of thing. After 30 minutes or so of focused headbanging, you just kind of become zombified.

In this sense, HoF are almost more of a Ministry-esque industrial band: Pike’s riffs are massive, but indistinct, like a constantly chugging metal-tipped scythe being dragged along the ground. Drummer Des Kensel plays like a one-man drum circle, with a thundering power that takes your breath away at certain moments. He never divides the tune up into segments of different beats and fills, the way most metal drummers do, and he also avoids the double bass drum trap that makes most metal into a rush to the finish. Instead, he just steadily plows each song into your skull with the determined pace of a man who just doesn’t give a fuck. At this point, Kensel and Pike have been doing this together for almost 15 years, and the rhythmic interplay and telepathic ratcheting of tension and power the two execute is astounding.

Your typical HoF track eventually gets to a point where Kensel (and since 2006, ex-Zeke bassist Jeff Matz) have made a frothy mess of your ear-thingies and then Pike hits some pedals and holy fucking shit just throws the whole song off a cliff for a few minutes with his eternal yawning lead work. If he were a lesser guitarist and this were a lesser band, the consistent way that Pike leads every tune into a prolongued solo section would seem indulgent and lame; but he isn’t and they aren’t and basically when you go see HoF you are waiting for these moments to mow down your mind with laserbeams of awesomeness.

It also helps that Pike is a true metal warrior of the type you don’t see that much anymore: amidst a clustered field of pasty dudes in black T-shirts of other bands composed of pasty dudes in black T-shirts of other bands, Pike is a true rock star. Six feet and change, long hair, sideburns, tattooed and shirtless, with crooked teeth and what people could politely refer to as a face that looks “lived-in,” his stage presence alone lends an authenticity to his molten tales of roaming sludge-lords. In recent years he has added a few tricks to his stage moves arsenal, playing nutty hammer-ons with one hand while using the other to exhort the crowd to an even greater frenzy. Tonight at the Middle East, his energy was infectious, even to the typically arms-folded Cantabrigian contingent. It doesn’t hurt too that his grizzled rock starpower and shirtless heroics guarantees that there might actually be the occasional female fan amidst the dudes with XXL hoodies and backwards Dean guitar baseball hats holding in their long curly locks.

High On Fire: Snakes For The Divine (Boston Phoenix, 2/17/10)

Joining a metal band as a young ‘un is a bit like getting hired as a burger flipper: you may dream of one day becoming Ray Kroc, but after years of toil, grease, and ridicule, you’ll probably settle for store manager. Oakland miscreant and main HOFer Matt Pike managed to circumnavigate the metal-as-franchise thing by creating his own competing chain, a sonic temple fashioned out of pounding riffage, gravel-gargling vocals, guitar solos that approximate the sound of a baby being tossed into a sacrificial pyre, and an unhealthy obsession with Celtic Frost. But after four slabs of pure relentless fury, where else is there to go?

Snakes for the Divine, then, is the sound of High on Fire finally relinquishing a smidge of their endless battery. There’s moodiness and jaunty harmonics in modest dollops — enough to send some of the faithful scurrying to their metal-purist blog of choice to curse the blasphemer. Yet despite its glossy finish (courtesy of producer Greg Fidelman, the man responsible for the most recent Metallica and Slayer albums), Snakes is still more Reign in Blood than Diabolus in Musica, if you catch my drift.

The album-opening title track is a beast in typical HOF form, but there’s a heaping of melodic heft to Pike’s guitar shredocity that makes the medicine go down so much easier than on previous records. And on album highlight “Frost Hammer,” it all comes together in a flash of breakneck thrash, sizzling ax, and ogre-taunting bellows gleaned from years of touring with the doom ingénues of Mastodon. After years of being the untrained savage in the china shop of modern metal, HOF may find themselves owning the store with this accomplished thrash platter.

HIGH ON FIRE | Middle East downstairs, 480 Mass Ave, Cambridge | April 7 @ 9 pm | $16 | 617.864.EAST orwww.mideastclub.com

Dethklok/Mastodon/Converge/High On Fire: Live, House of Blues, Boston, MA, 10/29/09

Heavy metal’s primary contradiction: given a fanbase that is often concerned with detecting what is and isn’t “real” metal, so much of what constitutes “real” “metal” is made up of 100-percent pure fantasy. Sometimes this results in a certain cultural conservatism. But mostly it just means that the true-est metal fan is the one who is (at least mentally) young enough to even care about both ends of this contradiction.  Meaning that metal’s longevity – the way it has evaded becoming just another musical fad – depends largely on its ability to attract a continuously new fanbase, one that springs to life and puts its fork and knife on the (kiddie) table of metal consumerism.

By my measure, the most significant reinvention of metal in the last decade or so has been a complete fabrication: specifically, Adult Swim’s Metalocalypse cartoon. Its fictional death-metal anti-heroes, Dethklok, have set a new bar for consistently high-quality brutality that somehow manages to transcend the fact that the band isn’t “real.” With the metal underground currently undergoing a crisis of faith that has allowed similarly fake bands to rise to supremacy whilst eschewing things like songs, vocals, beats, riffs, and substance (substitute instead: a smoke and mirror show centered on naked amplifier worship, dry ice, capes, and hieroglyphic mumbo-jumbo), it’s rewarding to see a fake band that actually gives the kids what they want. The greatest death-metal band of all time could never exist in real life, so it had to be invented.

Dethklok is the creation of Brendon Small, and although he’s a cartoonist by trade, he is also an absolutely bitching guitarist. He has an almost superhuman ability to play dementedly complex riffage whilst simultaneously bellowing precision death-metal lyrics. His touring band, composed of former Zappa sideslinger Mike Keneally and a big dude on drums who was in Exodus or Testament or one of those metal bands whose logo was made to look like it was bolted together from shiny metal sheets, were absolutely shredadelic. They played in perfect syncopation with a gigantic screen depicting the cartoon band running through the song. In the live show, as in the Adult Swim television series, the editing favors an ever escalating series of quick cuts juxtaposing images of grotesquery – which effectively doubles as a strobe light matching time with the drummer’s blast beats. The effect is one of complete and utterly disorienting nausea. Each song built inevitably to a double-time conclusion of seizure-inducing visual overload coupled with the band’s own race toward speed-metal insanity, complete with wah-assisted lead guitar doodledy-doo. It was powerful, it was funny, it was fatiguing, it was beautiful.

Often during the set, I tried to pry my eyes away from the cartoon to focus on the human players. This proved to be a futile endeavor, since a) the visuals on the screen were always far more interesting, and b) watching the band was kind of like watching a pit orchestra during an opera. The band was there front and center to remind you that they were physically capable of playing their inhuman music in the flesh and matching it up perfectly with the video on the screen – and they pulled it off with a precision that was laudable but oddly mechanical. If there is one chink in the Dethklok armor, it’s that in sticking so close to a pre-determined script, they short-circuit the unpredictability that “true” metal has always promised.

Before Dethklok destroyed the universe, we were serenaded by three of metal’s current reigning titans: a dream bill that only a cartoon could have thrown together. Three hours before Dethklok hit the stage, we were assaulted with the galloping assault of High On Fire, a band born from the ashes of stoner metal pioneers Sleep. Lead axeman/vocalist Matt Pike is essentially stoner metal’s Mark Farner: a wild, shirtless, longhaired bohunk who leads his more-than-serviceable rhythm section through a stomping and energetic set that gives him plenty of opportunity to put one foot on the monitor as he mercilessly shreds to oblivion, hair in face, evil grimace revealing an impeccably crooked set of chompers. Pike is the kind of dude who, if stoner-rock hadn’t put a Les Paul in his mitts at a crucial age, would probably be halfway to becoming Dennis Hopper’s character Feck from River’s Edge, another Cali burnout marking time until that one crucial motorcycle wipeout puts him on painkillers for good. As it stands, he will go down as one of the more influential axemen of his era, mixing an ability to mercilessly bludgeon an audience with riffage upon wonderful riffage with a penchant for letting leads take flight into a bleeding sunset of Nevermore.

The audience seemed not too aware of who the band was. (At one point in their set, a woman next to me leaned over and asked “What’s this band called?”, an amusing query considering that the band’s name was emblazoned in 15-foot-high lettering on the screen behind them). Identity? Who needs one, when we’re all being crushed under the horsehoof thunder of crushers like “Cometh Down Hessian” and “Waste of Tiamat” (the latter a showstopper with its twin dropout drum solo stutter breaks a la Slayer’s “Angel of Death”). Concerns of metal recognition (T-shirt sales, even) became insignificant when it feels like orc hordes are storming the gates to lop your head off with dirt-crusted daggers.

I found it odd when “hometown heroes” Converge galloped onstage with the line, “It’s great to be in Boston!” and that sort of rah-rah nonsense. Frontman Jake Bannon was nothing if not a metal-punk posi huckster, walking a fine line between pandering-to-his-minions and sarcastically-mocking-the-uninitiated-who-were-flipping-the-band-off-for-the-crime-of-not-being-Dethklok. Converge is riding the cresting wave of hype surrounding its new Epitaph long-player Axe To Fall, and this tour is a parable for their career – in that it thrusts an idealistic hardcore-ish band into the juvenile world of mainstream modern metal.

Even more difficult than navigating that particular knife’s edge is the prospect of selling Converge’s knotty brand of math-wound spazz metal to a broad audience. Axe To Fall is in some ways a bid for greater comprehension, which probably explains why the band stuck to the new platter when plying new ears. Before the show, I was near the Converge merch table where I overheard a request for the new album on vinyl. The response (“Yeah, we don’t have it yet, they’re held up by the pressing plant in Prague, but dude they are going to be so SICK”) kind of summed it up: the band’s ascendence could come too fast for their typically fussy approach to keep up with. Album opener “Dark Horse” was a mid-set highlight, as drummer Ben Koller dispensed with his spastic King-Crimson-run-through-a-woodchipper polyrhythms in favor of a more direct approach – one that hit the audience like a two-by-four to the face. The set ended with some quasi-confrontational sludge, as the band morphed material from their Jane Doe album with a bizarre cover of The Melvins’ “Hag Me.” It was far and away the most trebly set of the evening, and maybe the most straight-up energetic in terms of pure human excitement.

Which led us to Mastodon, a band that, while amazingly accomplished, isn’t always the most exciting. I guess I’ve always found them impressive – but with an admiration that’s never flowered into actual fandom. And if I’m honest, their set – full of razzle dazzle and jaw-dropping proficiency – was not a game-changer, not even the frankly terrific runthrough, at the set’s closing, of Thin Lizzy’s classic “Emerald.” Maybe it had to do with this being months and months into the world tour supporting their new album, Crack The Skye. Just like the last time they pulled through town, this time they played the album in its entirety, a move that tends to alienate even hardcore metal fans, who view with suspicion anyone who hasn’t memorized a band’s entire recorded catalogue. In its defense, Skye is a dense work whose tunes work better in context than on their own — but it’s also an album best enjoyed with headphones, under blacklight, whilst perusing the album jacket for hidden hieroglyphics. In the flesh, the album is occasionally a chore to get through, and the band seemed to exude a sort of let’s-get-this-over-with weariness, even though they were playing with some bitching gear. (Lucite clear custom-made aluminum neck flying V’s? Fuck yeah!)

Things livened up significantly when they dipped into encores from Leviathan andRemission (and the aforementioned Lizzy cover). At which point I began to disagree with everything I just wrote and decided that this band is pure dynamite: possessing a near-telepathic ability to syncopate slalom-like guitar runs with impossibly complex drum fills, producing a form of metal combustion that, absorbed in one sitting, is incomprehensibly walloping. The new album has brought this band so close to having comprehensible songs that you just kind of wish that they would commit full-bore and ditch the show-offy pyrotechnics for a change. With their multi-media assault, they have already surpassed their heroes in Neuroses and are on course to supplant Tool in the technical-metal-overlords sweepstakes. And yet in the band’s tight harmonies and diversions into chug-boogie and atmospheric dry-ice ambience, you can see glimpses of what could be if they completely forgot to pander to a metal audience at all. Here’s to hoping that they continue this progression.

Dethklok/Mastodon/High On Fire: Brute Forces (Boston Phoenix, 10/21/09)

When you get down to it, most music is an attempt to create auditory allegories for our life experiences, whether they’re joyous Maypole dervishes or nightmarish St. Vitus’ dances of doom. As a subgenre of rock and roll, heavy metal leans in the latter direction, and in its nearly four decades of existence, it’s managed to create its very own idioms. Favoring instrumental mastery and dark themes writ large across well-worn jean jackets, metal has always risked ridicule from other rock forms in its unbending desire to remain true to its ideals of chaos and tribal loyalty.

But what is it that makes a certain band or song or album or riff “metal”? Lyrical themes? The timbre of the vocals and guitars? Is there a set of rules for how the instruments should interact? Is there some sort of semiotic checklist?

“Naw, it’s just music that’s really fucking brutal.” The voice on the other end of the line belongs to an individual who enjoys some authority when it comes to defining metal. In addition to having affixed “brutal” to “metal” for 13 years with knuckle-dragging sludge Neanderthals High on Fire, Matt Pike also manned the low-tuned guitar in doom pioneers Sleep — a power trio who played a major part in rescuing heavy music from the alt-friendly ’90s’ aversion to long flowing locks and brutal palm-muted riffage. He refines his definition of metal by citing his band’s forthcoming long-player, Snakes of the Divine: “It’s just, you know, hit-you-in-the-face stuff — just heavy and shit.”

Pike and company are currently hitting throngs of young uns in their collective faces as part of a tour that joins High on Fire with fellow down-tuners Mastodon, spazzcore local heavies Converge, and, to top it off, Dethklok — yes, as in the fictitious metal band from the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse. Somehow, this tour, which comes to the House of Blues Tuesday and Wednesday, makes total sense: all three bands not only specialize in face-melting riff runs but are also merchants of metal’s continuously over-the-top allegorical æsthetic — even if the headliners amount to a pit band with animated corollaries projected on a screen that covers the stage.

Mastodon are arguably one of the most successful metal tall-tale tellers of all time. Their first major success came in 2004 with Leviathan, a loose concept based on Moby-Dick. This past spring they hit the Billboard Top 20 with Crack the Skye (Reprise), a dense song cycle revolving around Rasputin, astral travel, and Steven Hawking’s theories on wormholes.

“Our stuff, it’s all personal, you know, but it’s masked in this whole other story,” explains Mastodon drummer extraordinaire Brann Dailor. “We don’t want to be super-literal, because if we did, the audience would be like, ‘Oh, that is just something that happened to him.’ So it’s way better to create a new story with urban legends, Zoroastrian stuff, shit like that. Plus, it’s all great content for awesome metal T-shirts!”Pike likewise confesses to using metal’s fantastical bent to obscure the personal content of his songwriting. “We always inject realism into our songs, but they have, you know, a Dungeons & Dragons thing going on as well. Because all of these songs are fucking metaphors, you know? I mean, yeah, I’m talking about my real life, but there’s dwarves involved!” Amen to that: High on Fire, especially on the seminal releases Surrounded by Thieves (2002) and Blessed Black Wings (2005), created the audio analogue of, say, scenes from Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings: advancing armies of orcs, dark creatures spreading enormous wings and unsheathing unwieldy scimitars. And though the use of this imagery was hardly new in metal (thanks to fantasy-rock pioneers like Black Sabbath, Dio, Judas Priest, Motörhead, and, most especially, Derek Riggs’s iconic Iron Maiden mascot, Eddie), it had been driven far underground in the early ’90s as metalers of all stripes traded in their patchy denim for flannel and threadbare sweaters.

At this point, it’s clear that metal — unapologetic metal, brutal metal, metal full of fantasy and allegory and non-stop bludgeoning heavy-qua-heaviness — is back. The reason could have something to do with the rejection of ’90s post-hair-metal austerity. Or with the burial of the still-fragrant remains of nü-metal. Brendon Small, co-creator of Metalocalypse and guitarist and chief songwriter for Dethklok, started his project when he saw the scrawling on the wall. “For me, when I was noticing metal coming back, I was excited, because I grew up with it. When I was a student at Berklee, they didn’t teach metal, so I was happy to see people being technical and proficient while also doing all of this stuff that hadn’t been done before, advancing in heaviness and what not.”

Dethklok, as the fictional protagonists of Metalocalypse, could have been portrayed with brain-dead music to match the witlessness of the individual band members’ fictional personas, but one listen to either of the subsequent real-world Dethklok albums — 2007’s The Dethalbum and this fall’s Dethalbum II (Williams Street) — reveals not only the attention to detail but also a deep love for metal’s harmonious nature. “Honestly, doing this show is hard work, and every day of my life is about loud guitars and metal — so, obviously, I have to like metal a lot! I guess someone could have done this show with music that was really uninspired, but I really, for some reason, needed it to sound good to my ears.”

Small’s recipe for Dethklok’s mind-throttling chasm-fording riff salad is deceptively simple. “When I started coming up with Dethklok’s sound, I tuned my guitar really low, and then I started just, you know, throwing in Queen harmonies, ripping Brian May off. And then I threw in double kicks and guttural vocals, just trying to make everything melodic but also heavy and scary.”

Although the songs are in service to a comedy show, your average Dethklok tune will pass the Pepsi challenge with the crème de la crème of modern death metal; it might even transcend the genre. If there’s one sonic unifier of the bands on this tour, it’s a tendency toward hugeness. Time turns inward, movements speed and whip into a frenzy, and the lead guitar takes off on a soaring flight of fancy into a concentric void from which, it seems, there will be no return. That sort of thing.Maybe it’s this brutality that unites modern metal. A cursory viewing of any episode of Metalocalypse reveals that “brutal” is a catch-all phrase for all things metal. Dailor concurs: “It’s just a perfect word to describe pounding drums, jackhammer riffs, down-tuned guitars — you know, it’s just ‘fucking brutal’! That word, it’s just so true — we all know what it means — it’s brutal!”

DETHKLOK + MASTODON + HIGH ON FIRE + CONVERGE | House of Blues 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | October 27-28 at 6:30 pm | all ages | $34.50-$45 | 617.693.BLUE or www.hob.com/boston

OUT WITH THE NÜ Metal, in all its spread-winged glory, is now enjoying an unlikely wide acceptance — and Mastodon are one of the genre’s most successful tall-tale tellers.

When you get down to it, most music is an attempt to create auditory allegories for our life experiences, whether they’re joyous Maypole dervishes or nightmarish St. Vitus’ dances of doom. As a subgenre of rock and roll, heavy metal leans in the latter direction, and in its nearly four decades of existence, it’s managed to create its very own idioms. Favoring instrumental mastery and dark themes writ large across well-worn jean jackets, metal has always risked ridicule from other rock forms in its unbending desire to remain true to its ideals of chaos and tribal loyalty.

But what is it that makes a certain band or song or album or riff “metal”? Lyrical themes? The timbre of the vocals and guitars? Is there a set of rules for how the instruments should interact? Is there some sort of semiotic checklist?

“Naw, it’s just music that’s really fucking brutal.” The voice on the other end of the line belongs to an individual who enjoys some authority when it comes to defining metal. In addition to having affixed “brutal” to “metal” for 13 years with knuckle-dragging sludge Neanderthals High on Fire, Matt Pike also manned the low-tuned guitar in doom pioneers Sleep — a power trio who played a major part in rescuing heavy music from the alt-friendly ’90s’ aversion to long flowing locks and brutal palm-muted riffage. He refines his definition of metal by citing his band’s forthcoming long-player, Snakes of the Divine: “It’s just, you know, hit-you-in-the-face stuff — just heavy and shit.”

Pike and company are currently hitting throngs of young uns in their collective faces as part of a tour that joins High on Fire with fellow down-tuners Mastodon, spazzcore local heavies Converge, and, to top it off, Dethklok — yes, as in the fictitious metal band from the Adult Swim cartoon Metalocalypse. Somehow, this tour, which comes to the House of Blues Tuesday and Wednesday, makes total sense: all three bands not only specialize in face-melting riff runs but are also merchants of metal’s continuously over-the-top allegorical æsthetic — even if the headliners amount to a pit band with animated corollaries projected on a screen that covers the stage.

Mastodon are arguably one of the most successful metal tall-tale tellers of all time. Their first major success came in 2004 with Leviathan, a loose concept based on Moby-Dick. This past spring they hit the Billboard Top 20 with Crack the Skye (Reprise), a dense song cycle revolving around Rasputin, astral travel, and Steven Hawking’s theories on wormholes.

“Our stuff, it’s all personal, you know, but it’s masked in this whole other story,” explains Mastodon drummer extraordinaire Brann Dailor. “We don’t want to be super-literal, because if we did, the audience would be like, ‘Oh, that is just something that happened to him.’ So it’s way better to create a new story with urban legends, Zoroastrian stuff, shit like that. Plus, it’s all great content for awesome metal T-shirts!”

HIGH ON FIRE: “I mean, yeah, I’m talking about my real life, but there’s dwarves involved!”

Pike likewise confesses to using metal’s fantastical bent to obscure the personal content of his songwriting. “We always inject realism into our songs, but they have, you know, a Dungeons & Dragons thing going on as well. Because all of these songs are fucking metaphors, you know? I mean, yeah, I’m talking about my real life, but there’s dwarves involved!” Amen to that: High on Fire, especially on the seminal releases Surrounded by Thieves (2002) and Blessed Black Wings (2005), created the audio analogue of, say, scenes from Ralph Bakshi’s animated Lord of the Rings: advancing armies of orcs, dark creatures spreading enormous wings and unsheathing unwieldy scimitars. And though the use of this imagery was hardly new in metal (thanks to fantasy-rock pioneers like Black Sabbath, Dio, Judas Priest, Motörhead, and, most especially, Derek Riggs’s iconic Iron Maiden mascot, Eddie), it had been driven far underground in the early ’90s as metalers of all stripes traded in their patchy denim for flannel and threadbare sweaters.

At this point, it’s clear that metal — unapologetic metal, brutal metal, metal full of fantasy and allegory and non-stop bludgeoning heavy-qua-heaviness — is back. The reason could have something to do with the rejection of ’90s post-hair-metal austerity. Or with the burial of the still-fragrant remains of nü-metal. Brendon Small, co-creator of Metalocalypse and guitarist and chief songwriter for Dethklok, started his project when he saw the scrawling on the wall. “For me, when I was noticing metal coming back, I was excited, because I grew up with it. When I was a student at Berklee, they didn’t teach metal, so I was happy to see people being technical and proficient while also doing all of this stuff that hadn’t been done before, advancing in heaviness and what not.”

Dethklok, as the fictional protagonists of Metalocalypse, could have been portrayed with brain-dead music to match the witlessness of the individual band members’ fictional personas, but one listen to either of the subsequent real-world Dethklok albums — 2007’s The Dethalbum and this fall’s Dethalbum II (Williams Street) — reveals not only the attention to detail but also a deep love for metal’s harmonious nature. “Honestly, doing this show is hard work, and every day of my life is about loud guitars and metal — so, obviously, I have to like metal a lot! I guess someone could have done this show with music that was really uninspired, but I really, for some reason, needed it to sound good to my ears.”

Small’s recipe for Dethklok’s mind-throttling chasm-fording riff salad is deceptively simple. “When I started coming up with Dethklok’s sound, I tuned my guitar really low, and then I started just, you know, throwing in Queen harmonies, ripping Brian May off. And then I threw in double kicks and guttural vocals, just trying to make everything melodic but also heavy and scary.”

Although the songs are in service to a comedy show, your average Dethklok tune will pass the Pepsi challenge with the crème de la crème of modern death metal; it might even transcend the genre. If there’s one sonic unifier of the bands on this tour, it’s a tendency toward hugeness. Time turns inward, movements speed and whip into a frenzy, and the lead guitar takes off on a soaring flight of fancy into a concentric void from which, it seems, there will be no return. That sort of thing.

Maybe it’s this brutality that unites modern metal. A cursory viewing of any episode of Metalocalypse reveals that “brutal” is a catch-all phrase for all things metal. Dailor concurs: “It’s just a perfect word to describe pounding drums, jackhammer riffs, down-tuned guitars — you know, it’s just ‘fucking brutal’! That word, it’s just so true — we all know what it means — it’s brutal!”

DETHKLOK + MASTODON + HIGH ON FIRE + CONVERGE | House of Blues 15 Lansdowne St, Boston | October 27-28 at 6:30 pm | all ages | $34.50-$45 | 617.693.BLUE or www.hob.com/boston