“Take away the anchor/Amplify the mystery” - ‘Capillarian Crest’
“Baba Yaga.”
Brann Dailor, Mastodon drummer and tattooed love boy, picks his favourite mythical creature.The decision takes him roughly half a second. Like fellow bandmates Troy Sanders (bass/vocals), Brent Hinds (guitars/vocals) and Bill Kelliher (guitars/vocals) he’s intimately acquainted with the everlasting power of myth. After all, Mastodon only grudgingly exist in our world. They’d rather be elsewhere. Where the wild things are...
“She’s a badass evil Russian witch,” he continues, enthused. “She has a run-in with these kids in the forest and she’s got this crazy fuckin’ thing she flies around in. All those Russian fairytales they paint on the little tiny black lacquer boxes? They’re so cool. My wife went to Russia, and there were these people painting these boxes with little tiny brushes, working at ‘em for weeks and selling them for less than ten dollars. People are really poor over there right now. We fucked ‘em up good. ‘Yeah, be democratic, it’s great! Oops! It failed. Sorry about that. Build some bombs, alright?’ The mob are runnin’ shit over there.”
“I still wish they would find Bigfoot,” admits Troy, bashfully.
“Yeah,” agrees Brann. “Where is that motherfucker?”
Mastodon have just released their third album. It’s entitled Blood Mountain and what can I say about it but... oh my God, the RIFFS!!! There are few bands throwing riffs of this quality around with such reckless abandon right now. Brann and his merry band of explorers have taken the hyperkinetic heroism of their previous two albums Remission (2002) and Leviathan (2004) and twisted it into a Mobius comic strip populated by crazed mutations such as the Cysquatch (“a one-eyed sasquatch that can see into the future,” explains Brann) and the Birchmen (probably not members of American Anti-Communist organisation The John Birch Society). It’d all be impossible to absorb were it not for the fact that each and every one of the fucking things is catchier than a Cenobite’s flesh-hook, making Blood Mountain as much a total POP experience as an object lesson in the art of shredding. These riffs are so maddeningly infectious, they drove Brann Dailor crazy before he’d written them.
“You can’t control what riff is gonna come to you when and where or what’s gonna inspire it,” drawls the drummer. “I think the stuff that I write comes out of severe frustration from insomnia or whatever I might be going through at the time. My brain just won’t... I have real trouble sleeping, y’know?”
Have you had that for a long time?
“It’s been since uh... since Leviathan, I think. Yeah.”
Where does it come from? Too much caffeine? Not being able to shut off?
“Fuckin’ just trying to write songs. Or not even trying to write songs, but the riffs will just not stop in your head, y’know? The riff for ‘Blood And Thunder’ (off Leviathan) was in there for ever and it took me so long to get it out through a guitar and an amp. Then it was like, ‘Okay! That one’s gone!’ Know what I mean? I don’t know. If I’m not worrying about something, I don’t know what to do with myself. It gets messy up there.”
Have you considered treatment?
“No no no,” he sighs. “If I get drunk enough I can pass out on the bus with everybody else. And that’s what it comes down to sometimes. I get a couple of drinks in me and then I’m okay. And at home it’s not too bad unless we’re in the writing phase. Then I’m fucked, y’know? I’ll just lie there like, (hums main riff to ‘Blood And Thunder’ from Leviathan) ‘Dun-de-dun-de-dun-de-dun-dun!’ Or ‘Crystal Skull’. There’s a part in there that I knew wasn’t totally ready. The I went to see King Kong and they’re playing these wardrums, trying to get Kong to come out, and I got this part that went (hums ‘Crystal Skull’s tribal riff) ‘Guh-guh! Gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu!’ I couldn’t even pay attention to the movie after that! In the parking lot my wife asked me, ‘What riff do you have going?’ Hahaha! ‘Cos we’ll even be in the shower and she’ll be like, ‘What riff you got?’ I’m like, ‘Guh-guh! Gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu!’ Hahahaha! She’ll go, ‘Oh, that one. Is that the one from last night that was all night?’ I’m like, ‘Um... yeah’. My teeth’ll be grinding, y’know...”
Despite backgrounds in the typically reality-obsessed world of US hardcore (Brann and Troy are both former members of Lethargy and Today Is The Day) Mastodon have always leaned heavily towards myth and legend, but with a greater degree of erudition and sincerity than say, Hammerfall or Dragonforce. Brann in particular cites Joseph Campbell’s The Power Of Myth as an inspiration. Is that the kind of stuff you’ve always been into individually?
“That’s kind of what ties us together as people,” replies Brann. “We’re all like, ‘Yeah, cool! The Cysquatch!’ I thought everybody was like that! Myth and legend, that’s the beginning of human culture. That was the way you were taught manners or how to avoid horrible situations. Like, here’s what happened to Hansel and Gretel, y’know? It’s the beginning of religion, fables and fairytales. And there are monsters involved, so that’s cool. Hahaha!”
Would you ever forsake the world of fantasy and ‘go political’?
“It would interest me, personally,” muses Troy. “But I think Mastodon would go more bizarre than that, the way we all focus.”
“I’d rather be in a more spiritual realm,” agrees Brann. “I don’t wanna mix my music with war. I read as much as I can about it to have an inkling of a clue what’s going on even though there’s not much anybody can do about it. But I don’t know if I feel comfortable with that stuff in my music. It’s more like a spiritual thing, trying to go to the next level.”
You’re aiming for the fantastic, the transcendent.
“Yeah,” nods the drummer. “Everybody’s so obsessed with reality television and reality in everything, it’s like... where’s the fantasy?”
“I’d rather close my eyes and think of something cooler,” says Troy. “We like to go into our own little world.”
So we won’t ever see Mastodon trifling with the Punk The Vote movement?
“If we’re gonna be singing about tanks, they’ve gotta be... alive!” grins Brann. “If we’re gonna do some kind of anti-war album it would have to be totally metaphorical and cleverly done. Most of the people who decide, ‘We’re gonna make a political record because we’re upset about President Bush!’ They jump on that bandwagon and it’s like, ‘Yeah? Really? You think?’ We know he’s horrible and awful and that everyone around him is awful. You’re not saying anything.”
Okay, back to nature then. Have any of you ever been stuck up a mountain? Are you outdoors, trekking types?
“We try to be,” laughs Brann. “But we’re always stuck in a fucking van or a bus! I wanna go camping so bad, you have no idea. I used to camp all the time. I used to go to this place in upstate New York called Stony Brook Falls, and it had all these huge waterfalls and a big long trail. You could walk the trail and get in the waterfalls. I almost fell over in one once. I slipped on some algae, got pushed up and my legs went over. It was about a 120 feet drop, this waterfall, gushing over. I shit myself, hahaha!”
“I remember being lost,” Troy recalls. “You know, that feeling of having no direction, just infinite, non-stop trees? It made me fucking nervous. I remember that kind of shit from being little and exploring where my mom told me not to go, getting too far away and really losing it. I remember that feeling very well.”
Is it too fanciful to suggest that Mastodon are currently the world’s biggest psychedelic band? I don’t think so. Blood Mountain may be many things - superlative heavy metal, iron-clad pop, vertiginous prog - but it also follows an internal logic that can only have derived from a perspective bent all fucking sideways on hallucinogens. And nature, perhaps the greatest psychedelic of them all, if you’ll forgive me getting all Arthur Magazine on your ass.
“When I was a teenager, the only place for us to go to take acid was the woods,” confides Brann. “We’d just go out there for fuckin’ eighteen hours and start a bonfire and get lost in there. We’d see people in the trees and completely lose our minds. It was awesome. But y’know, I was a teenager, so no worries. We’d just go out there and laugh for hours and come up with the most bizarre scenarios of what was happening in the jungle, hahahaha! When it was really only a few yards away from someone’s backyard.”
That’s carried on into what you’re doing with Blood Mountain. A kind of self-generated syncretic myth-making.
“Yeah,” Brann smiles. “I can’t do acid anymore, but it got me into a good spot, I think. I could see everything so clearly under the influence of LSD.”
When did you realise you couldn’t do it anymore?
“I was in my mid-20s, I think,” he remembers. “Me and a friend of mine went over to our other friend’s house and there was a dude there who had some acid. I hadn’t done it in a long time but I was with a good, close friend of mine who I was actually helping off heroin at the time. He was like, ‘I just wanna take acid with you and have an awesome time,’ so we went over to this guy’s house and he had an eyedropper. He was like, ‘Just hold your tongue out,’ so I went ‘Alright,’ and that was a mistake. He dropped it and was like, ‘Oh fuck! I gave you way too much!’ He gave me the whole dropper. So I immediately started trying to scrape my tongue off, y’know.
“Anyway,” he continues. “That was a really, really, super-heavy trip. Rainbow coloured maggots coming out of the ceiling, the floor turning into water, my girlfriend turning into Satan. She was fuckin’ with me too, asking ‘What am I to you right now?’ And her face was like melting, so I was like, ‘You don’t wanna know! You just need to leave me alone right now...’ Actually what did it was, at six in the morning the phone rang. And you know when the phone rings and you’re tripping? ‘Oh my God! That’s the outside!’ My girlfriend got up to answer the phone, and it was her work calling, a Greek diner right around the corner from us. They were like, ‘Hey, this woman Cindy who works here has had a heart attack, and they’re taking her away in an ambulance!’ I could hear my girlfriend in the other room going, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ and I was like ‘OH MY GOD!!!’ My mother was in the hospital at the time, she’d recently had some really hardcore crazy shit go down. She was in intensive care, and that could have been a phone call to tell me my mom was dead or something. So from that point I was like, ‘I’m an adult, I can’t be doing that shit anymore. I have to be responsible, I’m not fifteen’. So that’s how it is.”
As you get older, the easier it is for reality to intrude...
“And the worse it gets,” Brann shakes his head. “Fuck that! I never wanna do that again in my whole life. I went through it, I had the best time in my life doing it, had a couple of flips, a couple of bad ones, but for the most part it got me to experience different kinds of music, different kinds of movies, different kinds of art. I think it expanded my mind, and I was able to use it as a tool to get to certain places. Now I know where those places are. So I don’t need it.”
“Baba Yaga.”
Brann Dailor, Mastodon drummer and tattooed love boy, picks his favourite mythical creature.The decision takes him roughly half a second. Like fellow bandmates Troy Sanders (bass/vocals), Brent Hinds (guitars/vocals) and Bill Kelliher (guitars/vocals) he’s intimately acquainted with the everlasting power of myth. After all, Mastodon only grudgingly exist in our world. They’d rather be elsewhere. Where the wild things are...
“She’s a badass evil Russian witch,” he continues, enthused. “She has a run-in with these kids in the forest and she’s got this crazy fuckin’ thing she flies around in. All those Russian fairytales they paint on the little tiny black lacquer boxes? They’re so cool. My wife went to Russia, and there were these people painting these boxes with little tiny brushes, working at ‘em for weeks and selling them for less than ten dollars. People are really poor over there right now. We fucked ‘em up good. ‘Yeah, be democratic, it’s great! Oops! It failed. Sorry about that. Build some bombs, alright?’ The mob are runnin’ shit over there.”
“I still wish they would find Bigfoot,” admits Troy, bashfully.
“Yeah,” agrees Brann. “Where is that motherfucker?”
Mastodon have just released their third album. It’s entitled Blood Mountain and what can I say about it but... oh my God, the RIFFS!!! There are few bands throwing riffs of this quality around with such reckless abandon right now. Brann and his merry band of explorers have taken the hyperkinetic heroism of their previous two albums Remission (2002) and Leviathan (2004) and twisted it into a Mobius comic strip populated by crazed mutations such as the Cysquatch (“a one-eyed sasquatch that can see into the future,” explains Brann) and the Birchmen (probably not members of American Anti-Communist organisation The John Birch Society). It’d all be impossible to absorb were it not for the fact that each and every one of the fucking things is catchier than a Cenobite’s flesh-hook, making Blood Mountain as much a total POP experience as an object lesson in the art of shredding. These riffs are so maddeningly infectious, they drove Brann Dailor crazy before he’d written them.
“You can’t control what riff is gonna come to you when and where or what’s gonna inspire it,” drawls the drummer. “I think the stuff that I write comes out of severe frustration from insomnia or whatever I might be going through at the time. My brain just won’t... I have real trouble sleeping, y’know?”
Have you had that for a long time?
“It’s been since uh... since Leviathan, I think. Yeah.”
Where does it come from? Too much caffeine? Not being able to shut off?
“Fuckin’ just trying to write songs. Or not even trying to write songs, but the riffs will just not stop in your head, y’know? The riff for ‘Blood And Thunder’ (off Leviathan) was in there for ever and it took me so long to get it out through a guitar and an amp. Then it was like, ‘Okay! That one’s gone!’ Know what I mean? I don’t know. If I’m not worrying about something, I don’t know what to do with myself. It gets messy up there.”
Have you considered treatment?
“No no no,” he sighs. “If I get drunk enough I can pass out on the bus with everybody else. And that’s what it comes down to sometimes. I get a couple of drinks in me and then I’m okay. And at home it’s not too bad unless we’re in the writing phase. Then I’m fucked, y’know? I’ll just lie there like, (hums main riff to ‘Blood And Thunder’ from Leviathan) ‘Dun-de-dun-de-dun-de-dun-dun!’ Or ‘Crystal Skull’. There’s a part in there that I knew wasn’t totally ready. The I went to see King Kong and they’re playing these wardrums, trying to get Kong to come out, and I got this part that went (hums ‘Crystal Skull’s tribal riff) ‘Guh-guh! Gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu!’ I couldn’t even pay attention to the movie after that! In the parking lot my wife asked me, ‘What riff do you have going?’ Hahaha! ‘Cos we’ll even be in the shower and she’ll be like, ‘What riff you got?’ I’m like, ‘Guh-guh! Gu-gu-gu-gu-gu-gu!’ Hahahaha! She’ll go, ‘Oh, that one. Is that the one from last night that was all night?’ I’m like, ‘Um... yeah’. My teeth’ll be grinding, y’know...”
Despite backgrounds in the typically reality-obsessed world of US hardcore (Brann and Troy are both former members of Lethargy and Today Is The Day) Mastodon have always leaned heavily towards myth and legend, but with a greater degree of erudition and sincerity than say, Hammerfall or Dragonforce. Brann in particular cites Joseph Campbell’s The Power Of Myth as an inspiration. Is that the kind of stuff you’ve always been into individually?
“That’s kind of what ties us together as people,” replies Brann. “We’re all like, ‘Yeah, cool! The Cysquatch!’ I thought everybody was like that! Myth and legend, that’s the beginning of human culture. That was the way you were taught manners or how to avoid horrible situations. Like, here’s what happened to Hansel and Gretel, y’know? It’s the beginning of religion, fables and fairytales. And there are monsters involved, so that’s cool. Hahaha!”
Would you ever forsake the world of fantasy and ‘go political’?
“It would interest me, personally,” muses Troy. “But I think Mastodon would go more bizarre than that, the way we all focus.”
“I’d rather be in a more spiritual realm,” agrees Brann. “I don’t wanna mix my music with war. I read as much as I can about it to have an inkling of a clue what’s going on even though there’s not much anybody can do about it. But I don’t know if I feel comfortable with that stuff in my music. It’s more like a spiritual thing, trying to go to the next level.”
You’re aiming for the fantastic, the transcendent.
“Yeah,” nods the drummer. “Everybody’s so obsessed with reality television and reality in everything, it’s like... where’s the fantasy?”
“I’d rather close my eyes and think of something cooler,” says Troy. “We like to go into our own little world.”
So we won’t ever see Mastodon trifling with the Punk The Vote movement?
“If we’re gonna be singing about tanks, they’ve gotta be... alive!” grins Brann. “If we’re gonna do some kind of anti-war album it would have to be totally metaphorical and cleverly done. Most of the people who decide, ‘We’re gonna make a political record because we’re upset about President Bush!’ They jump on that bandwagon and it’s like, ‘Yeah? Really? You think?’ We know he’s horrible and awful and that everyone around him is awful. You’re not saying anything.”
Okay, back to nature then. Have any of you ever been stuck up a mountain? Are you outdoors, trekking types?
“We try to be,” laughs Brann. “But we’re always stuck in a fucking van or a bus! I wanna go camping so bad, you have no idea. I used to camp all the time. I used to go to this place in upstate New York called Stony Brook Falls, and it had all these huge waterfalls and a big long trail. You could walk the trail and get in the waterfalls. I almost fell over in one once. I slipped on some algae, got pushed up and my legs went over. It was about a 120 feet drop, this waterfall, gushing over. I shit myself, hahaha!”
“I remember being lost,” Troy recalls. “You know, that feeling of having no direction, just infinite, non-stop trees? It made me fucking nervous. I remember that kind of shit from being little and exploring where my mom told me not to go, getting too far away and really losing it. I remember that feeling very well.”
Is it too fanciful to suggest that Mastodon are currently the world’s biggest psychedelic band? I don’t think so. Blood Mountain may be many things - superlative heavy metal, iron-clad pop, vertiginous prog - but it also follows an internal logic that can only have derived from a perspective bent all fucking sideways on hallucinogens. And nature, perhaps the greatest psychedelic of them all, if you’ll forgive me getting all Arthur Magazine on your ass.
“When I was a teenager, the only place for us to go to take acid was the woods,” confides Brann. “We’d just go out there for fuckin’ eighteen hours and start a bonfire and get lost in there. We’d see people in the trees and completely lose our minds. It was awesome. But y’know, I was a teenager, so no worries. We’d just go out there and laugh for hours and come up with the most bizarre scenarios of what was happening in the jungle, hahahaha! When it was really only a few yards away from someone’s backyard.”
That’s carried on into what you’re doing with Blood Mountain. A kind of self-generated syncretic myth-making.
“Yeah,” Brann smiles. “I can’t do acid anymore, but it got me into a good spot, I think. I could see everything so clearly under the influence of LSD.”
When did you realise you couldn’t do it anymore?
“I was in my mid-20s, I think,” he remembers. “Me and a friend of mine went over to our other friend’s house and there was a dude there who had some acid. I hadn’t done it in a long time but I was with a good, close friend of mine who I was actually helping off heroin at the time. He was like, ‘I just wanna take acid with you and have an awesome time,’ so we went over to this guy’s house and he had an eyedropper. He was like, ‘Just hold your tongue out,’ so I went ‘Alright,’ and that was a mistake. He dropped it and was like, ‘Oh fuck! I gave you way too much!’ He gave me the whole dropper. So I immediately started trying to scrape my tongue off, y’know.
“Anyway,” he continues. “That was a really, really, super-heavy trip. Rainbow coloured maggots coming out of the ceiling, the floor turning into water, my girlfriend turning into Satan. She was fuckin’ with me too, asking ‘What am I to you right now?’ And her face was like melting, so I was like, ‘You don’t wanna know! You just need to leave me alone right now...’ Actually what did it was, at six in the morning the phone rang. And you know when the phone rings and you’re tripping? ‘Oh my God! That’s the outside!’ My girlfriend got up to answer the phone, and it was her work calling, a Greek diner right around the corner from us. They were like, ‘Hey, this woman Cindy who works here has had a heart attack, and they’re taking her away in an ambulance!’ I could hear my girlfriend in the other room going, ‘Oh my God. Oh my God.’ and I was like ‘OH MY GOD!!!’ My mother was in the hospital at the time, she’d recently had some really hardcore crazy shit go down. She was in intensive care, and that could have been a phone call to tell me my mom was dead or something. So from that point I was like, ‘I’m an adult, I can’t be doing that shit anymore. I have to be responsible, I’m not fifteen’. So that’s how it is.”
As you get older, the easier it is for reality to intrude...
“And the worse it gets,” Brann shakes his head. “Fuck that! I never wanna do that again in my whole life. I went through it, I had the best time in my life doing it, had a couple of flips, a couple of bad ones, but for the most part it got me to experience different kinds of music, different kinds of movies, different kinds of art. I think it expanded my mind, and I was able to use it as a tool to get to certain places. Now I know where those places are. So I don’t need it.”
