Mastodon Concert Review

Friday night, at the Theater of the Living Arts in center city Philly I saw Mastodon perform with supporting acts Intronaut and Kylesa, who opened in that order. Even though the comparison is almost cliche at this point, Intronaut play a Neurosis-style progressive metal. Two guitars chugg over top of a very tight and talented rhythm section. Oddly enough, and not at all in metal style, the bass is not drowned out at all, nor is he relegated to just playing simple low-end bass lines. Instead many of Intronaut's songs feature the bass as a key element to the music, and sometimes the bass even carries the melody. Through out their career Intronaut has also drawn comparisons to Mastodon, but where Mastodon go and make anthemic rock songs that even feature melodic, harmonizing vocals, Intronaut are happy to just play in the muck of Neurosis' Through Silver and Blood, sprinkling instrumental distortion-free sections and hummable melodies where they please. So how were they live?
Intronaut songs generally last about 7 minutes or so, so not much of their catalog could be played within their 30 minute set. That left them to sticking to the new album's foot tappers from the "play one we all know" set that all opening bands find themselves delving into. The set was flawless though, and seemingly I wasn't the only one in the audience (about 100 people or so at the time) who had heard of them. The crowd got into the music and a few guys tried their best to head bang and mosh to the odd time signatures, but weren't really drunk enough to pull it off for more than a minute or two. The set ended with said rhythm section grooving along to the final song's music for an extended 45 seconds or so after the two guitarist/singers finished playing. I highly recommend checking this band out if you are a fan of progressive metal, or really anything Neurosis-esque.
The next band up was one I knew only a little about going into the show, Kylesa. They feature 5 members, two of which sing, and one of which is also a guitar shredding female. And not to take away from the rarely found metal gal, but the "shtick" of the band was clearly their use of two drummers. Yes, two. The drummers set up almost identical drum sets, and play predominately the same part save for a few moments when either drummer would add their own syncopation or drum fill. But aside from a few moments the dual-drumming goes largely unnoticed. If I had to describe the style of music it'd be where Melvins/Kyuss style stoner rock and Sick of it All punk rock meets EyeHateGod style southern rock and Venom style black metal with a female vocalist that sings in between her male counterpart in either a metal growl or a Jarboe style croon. Yeah, it's all over the fucking place. But they were good. I don't know any of their songs so I can't really say what their set focused on, and while I myself probably won't be getting any of their albums soon, they are worth at least checking out.
Then it was time for Mastodon. Some ambient noise was played, the large multi-screen TV thing behind them lit up with pictures of galaxies, stars, and black holes. And then over top of that was what seemed to be scenes from a black and white movie about Rasputin (obviously because of the influence he had on the "story" of the Crack the Skye album). They literally played Crack the Skye from front to back, all seven songs, for the first half of the set. I was surprised at first, and a little afraid that they might not play anything from their other albums. Then I caught on about 3 songs in that they were playing the entire album, and there was no way that was taking their whole set up. I'm not going to dissect each song, but let me just say that all of the songs sounded great live. Even the ones that I wasn't crazy about on the album. The 10 minute long Czar and 13 minute long Last Baron were played flawlessly, including the Rush-YYZ moment in The Last Baron which got a round of applause from the now sold out sized crowd. Mastodon then left the stage for about 3 minutes or so for a break, and then returned triumphantly for the second half of their set. The screen now displayed the Blood Mountain album art and Mastodon went into an extended version of Blade Catcher. The rest of the songs went chronologically backwards in albums and were as follows:
Colony of Birchmen
Crystal Skull
The Wolf is Loose
Capillarian Crest
Seabeast
Iron Tusk
March of the Fire Ants

(I may have missed a song there, or switched one or two, but I think that's right)

Needless to say the crowd was more than happy to hear Mastodon's newer songs, and ecstatic to hear the older songs, and some of their most heavy of songs at that. Even in the packed house a large mosh pit was able to open up in the middle, but I was there to hear the music so I opted to go upstairs to the 21+ bar section to take in the show. It was weird to leave such a crowded show not having been basted in hairy-heavy-other-metal-men juice. And let me just say, Mastodon clearly brings forth some of the hairiest of metal-heads. One thing I also saw, and expected, in the audience was a healthy group of hipsters with their ironic big black framed glasses. Yet while they were there, their presence was not as overwhelming as I had feared it might be because of their new album and refined sound. So good times were had by all, including the gym clothes wearing, shoeless, probably drugged out guy who was doing some wild dancing in the middle of the mosh pit during Kylesa's set and dodging clotheslines from nearby metal-heads who were seemingly unhappy with his hippy style rug-cutting that'd be better suited at Bonnaroo. The old bonnaroo, not the new washed down commercialized new-day wood stock let down that it is today. Good times indeed.