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
gunter glieben glauchen globen 