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