MetalSucks

[Writer and musician Tres Crow comes to us from the excellent blog Dog Eat Crow, for which I just published a Halloween-inspired list of The Top 5 Goriest Metal Album Covers of All Time. What follows is an incredible piece of creative writing written by Mr. Crow based on Mastodon's Crack the Skye. The first part ("Intro") is a true recounting of a run-in we had with Brent "Tasmanian Devil" Hinds whilst visiting Atlanta for the Scion Rock Fest. The rest is all culled from the twisted, Mastodon-induced imaginings of Tres' own mind. It is long, but worth it. Enjoy! - Ed.]

The Mastodon Beard
By Tres Crow

Intro

Before I really get into the meat and potatoes of this thing I think I need to make a little confession: I first became interested in Mastodon primarily because of Brent Hinds’ totally wicked beard. Now don’t get me wrong, it wasn’t any kind of creepy infatuation, like watching him shower through peepholes type of thing, but more like, let’s say, professional admiration, as in one bearded red-headed dude to another.

You see I am a man of relatively modest bearded means, and though in my chosen field of Banking I am considered a rebel for wearing facial hair so defiantly against accepted business attire and hygiene, when I first saw the tarantula legs Mr. Hinds was sporting from his chin I was totally awed.

Let me break this first meeting down for you: I’m standing in a tiny hole in the wall bar in Atlanta with the esteemed moderators of this very blog, Mssrs. Neilstein and Rosenberg, a bar which has this night been totally taken over by Metal fans of every shape and size on account of the Scion Metal Fest. I’m sipping a beer and feeling extraordinarily out of place in my bright blue rain jacket and neatly trimmed rebel-Banker beard and I keep eyeing all the khaki military jackets and black band shirts and ferocious, tousled facial mats with a mixture of wariness and wonder. Clearly I am in the midst of something extraordinary, beard-wise; from wall to wall there is the most amazing array of goatees, full-on Hemingway bushes, twisty oriental spires descending like stalactites several inches, handlebars like the Hulk used to wear (still does apparently), faces that seem to grow out from the beards instead of the other way around. Hell, there is even the occasional mustache sprinkled through the crowd for good measure. I mean, basically, the place is like a veritable Beard Convention and we’re all milling about, drinking beers and shuffling feet and exclaiming loudly about one thing or another, everyone with the unmistakable posture of someone waiting for something. It’s like we’ve all come together for a purpose that maybe not everyone even realizes what it is yet, but there’s definitely this feeling of purposeful waiting, of expectation.

And then it happens, what we’ve all been waiting for without even really knowing it. Like some kind of verbal version of the wave a rumor starts to spread throughout the tiny place: Brent Hinds is here. I crane my neck to get a glimpse of this Brent guy even though I’m not really even certain who he is.

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On Sunday night we caught the Beard Destroyer 2009 tour with Hull and Batillus (sadly for us, Salome didn’t play that date). It crushed even harder than we thought it would, so we asked our friend, Batillus skinsman Geoff Summers, to do a tour wrap-up for us. We hope you enjoy!

So, here I sit with a mild case of PTD (post-tour depression) writing up this wrap report for the so-called Beard Destroyer tour featuring Salome, Hull, and my band, Batillus. We had some good times, and we had some bad times. It rained. A lot. Everywhere we went. Fortunately, though, the good dwarfed the bad. Let’s recap…

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My favorite cartoon characters are Brent Hinds and the members of Dethklok. Seriously. I once watched Hinds do a belly-flop onto a bar table covered in beer mugs. He came out of a coma and is only sillier for the experience. You could drop an anvil on that dude’s head and all that would happen is he’d see little tweety-birds buzzing around his head. And then he’d write an awesome concept album about them.

So: in what strikes me as only semi-strange news, Mastodon and Dethklok will co-headline a tour this fall, with support coming from Converge and High on Fire. I am slightly miffed that the mighty High on Fire and absolutely God-like Converge are opening for a make believe band, but since it’s Dethklok, I’ll let it pass… this time.

Complete list of dates after the jump.

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Thanks to Kit Hart for sending us this of Mastodon’s Brent Hinds jamming on “Bury Me in Smoke” with Down at Greece’s Rockwave Festival a couple of weeks back. The quality’s only so-so, but still, it’s one of the awesome team-ups I dig so much, and this may be the only documentation of its existence. Enjoy.

-AR

Those disappointed by the apparent sobriety of Mastodon guitarist Brent Hinds in his recent studio video will be pleased with the return to his usual, blissfully wrecked state in this interview conducted by Altitude. Hinds sheds some light on the concept behind Mastodon’s upcoming video for the single “Divinations,” and the results are, well, perfectly Mastodonian:

I’m trapped in a block of ice dressed as a cave man, there are explorers, they come find me, I put the Flying V up to the block of ice and it melts, I come out, play a rippin’ guitar solo, kill all of them, and then I eat them, and then a Yeti comes out and eats me.

YES! Axl remarked to me the other day that he wasn’t super-excited about this record, and I kind of agreed. But the more I hear the actual band members talk about the record the more stoked I become. Have faith!

-VN

Guitar World, the favorite magazine of six string dweebs everywhere, has video of Mastodon in the studio recording their forthcoming Crack the Skye, and what struck me most about the footage is this: how different Brent Hinds seems from the crazy dude of interviews past. Is this really the same guy who did his entire part on the band’s The Workhorse Chronicles DVD from inside a shower? I guess he learned his lesson from all the drunken drama of the past few years.

I was kind of looking forward to Hinds becoming his generation’s Ozzy Osbourne – in the “Hahaha he peed on the Alamo while wearing a dress” kinda way, not in the “Someone please just off this fucker already” kinda way – but I guess I can settle for Brent being happy and healthy instead.

-AR