I must be regressing. Either that, or my midlife crisis is finally kicking in. While I like to say that I largely swore off my love of slackjawed heavy metal just prior to my freshman year of college (as detailed right here -- there was no way of carting all of my vinyl out to my school in Ohio, so I took all my punk, hardcore and new wave and left behind most of my metal), I never totally renounced it. I still took along albums by perennial faves like Motorhead (yes, ultimately a metal band, but really more of a genre unto themselves, kinda like Johnny Cash), AC/DC, Kiss, Black Sabbath, Van Halen, Iron Maiden (the day I renounce `Maiden is the day I renounce breathing), Slayer, Anthrax, Venom, Metallica (this was before they started to suck) and a few choice others, but jettisoned the poodle-haired, Sunset Strip crap like Ratt, Lita Ford and Quiet Riot. Gradually, however, my roots in metal fandom started to bubble back to the surface, especially when the lines between hardcore and metal began to blur (thanks to crossover bands like D.R.I., Agnostic Front and the second album by Suicidal Tendencies, to name but a few). It's all rock'n'roll, at the end of the day.
Twenty-one years later, I'm no longer so concerned with defining myself by the music I listen to (I have albums by artists like the Butthole Surfers and Christian Death and albums by artists like Sade and Everything But the Girl and I don't give a great goddamn who knows it). While I still love great, mammoth-sounding old school, skull-crushing metal, I'm no longer as up on the cutting edge of all things metallic as I might've once been. As such, I've become one of those embittered old curmudgeons who labouriously lambasts the new generation's attempts if only simply because I'm self-consciously feeling my oats these days. Enter new co-worker Chris H., the youthtfully irreverent metal writer for MTVNews Online. While I may indeed gasp and frown dismissively at his odd exclamation or random confession (such as not owning any Motorhead albums and/or thinking that all live albums are crap), he is an indefatiguable source of info on a whole new breed of metal bands, and his enthusiasm for same is hugely infectious. Chris was among the elite throng who hipped me to the glorious ear-worrying thunder that is The Sword, a band whose debut album has significantly restored my faith in the soul-devouring power of that which rocks (especially when certain favorite bands of mine just ain't comin' with it -- more about that maybe later). Age of Winters by the Sword has become one of my favorite albums of the past few months, and I dutifully passed a copy of it onto my fresh-faced, tow-headed nephew, Whalen, with the hopes (and explicit instruction) that he routinely torment the ears of his immediate loved ones with its sonic maelstrom of armor-clad rock ferocity.
Chris kept assuring me, however, that if the Sword managed to mow my lawn, that my hair would positively fall out with adoration over Mastodon, a tattooed gaggle of unsightly ruffians from Atlanta, GA who practice an equaly unwieldy brand of bludgeoning metal as The Sword, but with more of a progressive bent. He specifically cited their album Leviathan from 2004 as the one to get. While I was genuinely intrigued, I never managed to get around to picking up one of their albums (despite applauding their needlessly over the top cover art). Eventually, Chris got impatient and went ahead and burned me a copy -- which was jolly nice of him (chastising me not but a half hour later for not listening to it yet). Curious to properly check it out, I took it home and ripped it to my iTunes, ready to listen to it on my way to work the next day (with a newborn and a toddler in the house, my opportunities to blast the paint off the walls with any type of music are now permanently on hold).
After another sleepless night (thanks to my newborn son's clarion call for round the clock feedings and the entirely-too-early wake-up warblings of my two year old daughter), I stumbled blearily out onto East 9th street, prepared to face another day at MTVNews Online. For my walk-to-midtown's soundtrack, I dutifully dialed up Leviathan on my iPod and got on my way. Within seconds, the album's opening track, "Blood & Thunder" came galloping out of my headphones, charging into the fragile labywrinths of my inner ear through to my skull like a horde of club wielding Visigoths. While probably not the first thing one should unleash on one's ears first thing in the morning, Leviathan by Mastodon acts as a palpably eye-opening galvanizer; immolating the cobwebs in an all-engulfing torrent. Me likey!
A concept album based on Herman Melville's "Moby Dick" (song titles include "Aqua Dementia," "Seabeast" and the inevitable "I Am Ahab"), Leviathan is rioutously ludicrous, but executed with such a po-faced devotion to cause that you can't help but adore it. Much like the afore-mentioned Sword, Mastodon take their cues from old school metal (you'll find no bones thrown to Hip Hop stylings or funk here), but swap the Sword's penchant for the bottom-heavy swing of vintage Black Sabbath for the hellbound vocal traits of Venom and the predeliction for progressive noodling found in classic King Crimson. Mastodon are fittingly ferocious in their blustering stomp and alternately complex and tight in their arrangment. They may not be pretty and they may not be delicate, but they are surely a force to be reckoned with. By the time I'd reached 34th street (midway through "Iron Tusk"), my Tinnitus was ringing like a tea kettle and my arms were sore from uninhibitedly air-drumming my way up 6th Avenue. When I finally arrived at the office, I found Chris casually smokin' a cigarette out front with a "told'ja so!" expression on his face.
Armed with a one-two iron-fisted punch of The Sword and Mastodon, my unapologetic love of metal has clawed its way out of its coffin, up through the dirt and is back from the grave to summarily wreak havoc (if you spot me setting my wife's Van Morrison and Natalie Merchant discs on fire and whipping them out onto 9th street sometime soon, you'll know why).
You can read Chris' froth-mouthed account of the impending Mastodon album, the rapturously titled Blood Mountain (rife, I'm told, with "numinous Yetis and one-eyed Sasquatchs") by clicking right here. Not for the faint of heart.
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