It’s 9:30 p.m. on a Friday. Mastodon drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor is having dinner in his hometown of Atlanta at a joint called The Rusty Nail. With his wife. Illinois Entertainer is interrupting. Obviously.

Appearing: November 13th at Riviera Theatre in Chicago with Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang.

“They said, ‘Hey, you wanna do an interview on Friday night at 9:30?’ I said, ‘Hell yeah, sign me up,’” Dailor jokes to make us feel better. We think.

Fact is, we feel awful about stealing Dailor away from his meal, his wife, and the Led Zeppelin on the jukebox. But it ain’t easy scoring an interview with Mastodon nowadays. Seventy-two hours earlier, the heavy-metal heavyweight released its fifth full-length, The Hunter (Reprise). Five days after we talk to Dailor, Billboard announces that the 39,000 copies it shipped in the United States are good enough for 10th on their main album chart. That same night, Mastodon performed The Hunter’s first single, “Curl Of The Burl,” on “The Late Show With David Letterman.”

See where we’re going, here?

Basically, we were lucky to talk to Dailor when we did, ’cause The Hunter is hot shit. Any doubts or questions about whether Dailor, bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders, guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds (that’s three vocalists if you’re scoring at home), and guitarist Bill Kelliher could follow up 2009’s Crack The Skye, The Hunter shoots them down. There is riffage (“Blasteroid”), brutality (“Spectrelight”), beauty (“The Sparrow”), groove (“Curl Of The Burl” is ZZ Top on a metal trip), and, simply put, weird-ass shit (“Creature Lives”).

What there isn’t, is a concept. So technically, not all expectations can be thrown out the window because, who didn’t expect another massive, soaring, epic “concept album” from Mastodon? It’s been the Southern group’s modus operandi for some time now, dating back to its 2004 breakout, Leviathan. It, Mastodon’s “water” record, was loosely based on Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. Blood Mountain, from 2006, was its “earth” record, and Crack The Skye, about astral travel (and Rasputin!), its “air.”

The Hunter? Well, it’s just an “album” album. No one song answers to another, giving Dailor and co. the option of going wherever the hell they want from one track to another, which is exactly what they do. “It was really kind of freeing, you know? We had done three concept records in a row, and they are very hard to do,” Dailor says. “They are very labor intensive, and you have to come up with the storyline; you have to try to build some sort of continuity without losing the way the record flows. It’s a fine line. It’s not easy. It’s really stressful.”

Try interrupting someone’s dinner with a half-hour of questions.

IE: Was it strange, initially, writing songs that weren’t intertwined thematically?
Brann Dailor: No, not really. It was a lot easier, to be honest. It was way easier. It was almost like we didn’t even have to try. [Laughs.] No, we still had to try, obviously. It was a breath of fresh air for sure, when the decision was made not to do a concept album. I had already come up with a concept. My feelings were that’s what everyone expected from me, to come up with a lofty concept. I liked what I had come up with, but it needed some work. I went and shared it with the class, basically, and everyone dug it, but when we really started digging in and started writing, I think it was Brent who came up and said, “Dude, do we have to do another concept album?” I was like, “No, we don’t have to. We don’t have to do anything. Do whatever we want, you know – no big deal.

IE: So was it right there on the spot you decided to pull back the reins, so to speak?
BD: We decided to take a more stress-free approach to writing the record in the first place. There was a lot of stress surrounding the band, like personal things that were going on with different band members that were stressful enough. Whereas previously when you went in to write a Mastodon record, it’s a really stressful thing because you have concepts involved and really intricate song structures, and you’re in there every day banging your head against the wall trying to link up all these riffs that really don’t belong together – which is fun, to an extent, and also labor-intensive, and you’re there every day all day long trying to work it out. It’s stressful. You go home at night and you can’t sleep. Not that that was different this time around. I was stressed out, but more stressed out at what was happening at the outside of Mastodon. Then when we got in there and started writing music, we just sort of decided not to let that part of our lives be stressful and go from the gut as far as what we were writing music-wise. Like, three or four riffs strung together is a pretty basic rock song. Record it, put some vocals over the top, and yeah, we like that. On to the next song. Instead of really trying to be, “Oh, it’s not complicated enough.” We didn’t really crave that this time. It needed to be more of a fun release.

IE: How hard would it have been to top Crack The Skye as far as super-epic, super-proggy, super out-there, anyway?
BD: I don’t know. For us, we don’t think too much about previous releases once we start working on new music. We are just sort of consumed with the music that is being created at hand, not really even . . . the music that happened before is gone. It just doesn’t even exist. We want to sound like us still, but we definitely don’t want to be retreading. We don’t want to be running in place. We wanna hear something new, you know? We’ve had that same question after every record. How are you going to top Remission? How are you going to top Leviathan? How are you going to top Blood Mountain? So on and so forth. I guess the answer is that you just don’t really pay attention to those records once you go in to write new stuff. You just write new stuff and trust yourself to police yourself in the same way, and you’re gonna travel down all those musical roads that are offered up, I guess. You can talk all day about what kind of record you wanna write, but then when it starts coming to life, it definitely takes on a life on its own. I think you’d be doing that particular music injustice to stop mid-stride and say, “Oh we can’t do this. We can’t write this. We can’t play this song because it’s not Mastodon.” We’re playing it, we’re liking it, so there must be a reason for that. You need to go all the way down that road, otherwise you’re not really doing what you want to do. You’re kind of letting the possibility of someone else’s opinion govern what your art sounds like and looks like. That’s not fair.

IE: “Creature Lives” is a good example of what you’re saying. Is that the weirdest song Mastodon has ever released?
BD: I guess that’s a good example of a song where, it’s really, um, I just think it’s a really great thing that [song] can live on a Mastodon record and be a Mastodon song and, in some people’s eyes, have the audacity to call it a Mastodon song. In other people’s eyes it’s something fantastic. The guys in the band, we really love it. We welcome it into the catalog as something that could spark music in the future from us that, maybe wouldn’t sound exactly the same, but another musical avenue that we’re interested in. I just think it’s cool to have stuff like that in there. Once it’s all said and done and Mastodon goes away, hopefully the catalog, and the type of music the catalog is representative of, is vast and extremely varied.

IE: Sticking with this theme, “All The Heavy Lifting” seems like one of the catchiest songs you guys have ever done. Troy’s vocals are amazing on that tune. It seems every album he makes leaps and bounds as a vocalist.
BD: Yeah, that’s pretty catchy, I guess. Troy is awesome on the record. He killed it for sure. He worked really hard and took voice lessons and stuff like that, so he’s been working hard on his vocals. He’s stepped up on this record. The last record Brent sang a lot, so Troy was like, “I’m gonna sing a lot on this record.” [Laughs.] It’s not as cut-and-dried as that, but it was kind of the idea to get more Troy in there for this record. But yeah, he did a great job and that chorus is pretty infectious, I’d have to say.

IE: How do you work out the vocal parts with three of you singing now?
BD: It’s real diplomatic. A lot of times when we’re writing, we already have a vocalist in mind for a certain part. Like for “All The Heavy Lifting,” I went in and laid the groundwork for it, but we knew Troy would sing over top of it. For “Thickening,” we knew Brent had an idea for that part, and for like “Dry Bone Valley” I went in and sang it and everybody dug it. We all admire each other’s vocal stylings, and basically, a lot of times, it comes down to whether you are able to pull it off live. “Can you sing that and play it at the same time?” If someone is dying to sing something, we’re going to let them.

IE: And how about the mandatory Scott Kelly [Neurosis] appearance?
BD: Well Scott’s just a great person and a good friend of ours, and he’s a huge inspiration on the band. We’ve said it many times before, but if it weren’t for Neurosis there wouldn’t be Mastodon. Any time we can get him to sing on something, it’s definitely welcomed. But we wouldn’t shoehorn it in there. We have to sort of hear it on a part. We wrote “Spectrelight” and weren’t sure that song was really going to come together. But once we were in the studio, Bill came up with a couple different parts to add to the two parts I had, and we just kinda slammed it out. It ended up being pretty killer. Then we gave it to Scott to see if he would be interested in doing something on it, and he was all about it.

– Trevor Fisher

For the complete interivew, click the November issue’s cover thumbnail, or grab a copy free throughout Chicagoland.

A curious bill of artists mixing an odd hodgepodge of metal styles, a fictional band brought to life, and a psychedelic astral journey set to prog-metal made for an astounding, exhausting night of music.

Bludgeoning the audience with the thundering roar of its thrashing, sludgy metal, High On Fire set the tone for the night with the skull-crushing opening cut from Death Is This Communion, “Fury Whip.” Monstrous drums and cataclysmic guitar rained down as Matt Pike and company jack hammered through the furious stop-start riff. From then on, Pike unleashed a brutally relentless assault of molten stoner riffs, blazing solos, and flying saliva. Thankfully, we were well out of range of that last bit.

Venerable hardcore veteran Converge seemed a misplaced candidate for this bill, but there was Kurt Ballou standing alone, center stage, pumping out the shattered glass riff of “Plagues” before the rest of the band jumped on stage. For the next 30 minutes, the guys were a furious blur of pin-wheeling arms, arched backs, and whipped instruments as they ripped through a harrowing set that focused on post-Jane Doe material, and included a few pile-driving cuts from its latest release, Axe To Fall (Epitaph). Jacob Bannon left no ear unscathed, as his shrieking bark tore through the mix, buffeted by Ballou’s gory, apocalyptic guitar. Few metalheads in the audience were inspired by Converge’s crashing clamor and voracious energy, but when Ballou and bassist Nate Newton joined Bannon in bellowing, “I’ll take my love/To the grave” in “The Broken Vow,” it was an exhilaratingly cathartic moment.

For this tour, Mastodon is tasking a risky gambit, playing Crack The Skye (Warner Bros.) in its entirety. Conceptually, it’s a labyrinthine piece, brimming with mystical flights of fancy, fantastical allegories, and supernatural characters all layered into a twisted, dense story. Conveying that story on stage would seem to be a daunting task, but from the opening see-sawing riff of “Oblivion”  to the final echoing crackle of “The Last Baron,” Mastodon masterfully executed its opus.

Brent Hinds’ guitar wizardry is the core of Skye and he fluidly rattled off the brittle, Pink Floyd-esque melody of “The Czar” with each note ringing through the rafters, and the crooked, rough crunch of the title track. Bill Kelliher supplied soaring, lush counterpoint to Hinds’ shimmering lead in “The Last Baron,” and ample chunk and grind in “Divinations.” Troy Sanders’ thick, wide bass was surgically welded to Brann Dailor’s technically precise, nimble drumming, and their lock-step rhythms anchored the guitar pyrotechnics, as a streaming video montage of surrealistic images and visual metaphors hinted at the story without slavishly reflecting a literal interpretation. The ebb and flow of the images paralleled the mood and structure of the album, and provided a compelling visual backdrop, the iridescent light illuminating Hind’s curly mane so that it shone like a halo.

After concluding Crack The Skye, the guys took a short respite, as ambient keyboards washed over the crowd, before the blistering fusillade that launched “Circle Of Cysquatch” announced Mastodon’s return. As if to counter-balance the melodic, progressive leanings of Crack The Skye, Mastodon emphasized heavy, rib-rattling numbers for this portion of the set. It dove into the back catalog for “Aqua Dementia” and the rumbling cacophony of “Where Strides The Behemoth” before finishing with a smashing rendition of The Melvins’ “The Bit.”

Detractors have noted that Mastodon’s progressive and psychedelic tendencies have slowly but consistently eroded the thrash-metal foundation of its early career, with Crack The Skye being the culmination of that trend. If any such detractors were present, they were drowned out by the rowdy, enthusiastic crowd that relished hearing the album in its entirety, and witnessing a truly innovative metal powerhouse at the height of its power.

“Metalocalypse” star Dethklok finished off the night with a deafening set of bombastic thrash and death metal as flesh-and-blood characters replaced the animated ones. Lead guitarist and vocalist Brendon Small is the mastermind behind the whole concept, writing the characters, music, and lyrics, and he’s responsible for recruiting musicians to bring Dethklok’s music to life. The fictional characters may poke fun at metal stereotypes, and the carnage wrought in the animated television series may seem excessively crass, but musically, Dethklok is all business. Clench-fisted, intertwined guitar dynamics and explosive rhythmic dynamite propelled pummeling versions of “Bloodlines,” “Hatredcopter,” and an especially bruising performance of “Thunderhorse.” Animated images and cartoon snippets flashed across the video projection, and provided some comic distraction, while Dethklok cranked through its punishing set. If the entire project may seems a bit too clever or contrived, the music was certainly convincing, and as Jacob Bannon admonished earlier in the evening, “These guys aren’t fucking cartoons, they’re genuinely talented musicians.” He was right.

– Patrick Conlan

One night later, in Chicago . . .

The lineup at the Aragon Ballroom Saturday night was evidence enough of how popular metal is once again. Dethklok, Mastodon, Converge, and High On Fire represented a cross-section — and not nearly all-inclusive — of some of the genres supported by this broad wave of popularity. Most notable is the fact that the headlining band, Dethklok, is actually a marketing construct of Cartoon Network’s Adult Swim show “Metalocalypse.” Metal may have finally jumped the shark with this tour.

The fictional, melodic death-metal band was brought to vivid life with well-choreographed videos on a screen, showing cartoon imagery and violent, video-game action perfectly timed with the double-bass drum assault. The actual musicians, mostly running through The Dethalbum and the recently released Dethalbum II (Williams St.), were anonymously stationed in the shadows at the front of the stage. The visual projection was the focus as it mixed animated, music-video montages with apocalyptic/military-experiment/sci-fi footage. The musicians behind the spectacle delivered the goods, with the full-house crowd — the majority of which were older males — reveling in the tongue-in-cheek allusions to the cartoon and fully participating in the over-the-top, Gwar/Spinal Tap-like parody.

Progressive metal upstarts Mastodon were all business for the bulk of their set, determined to rip through the seven songs on this spring’s critically acclaimed concept album, Crack The Skye (Warner Bros.). Opener “Oblivion” suffered from a far too quiet mix of vocals, but overall the four-piece from Atlanta (with a fifth member on synthesizer) was up to the task of presenting live what on album is a complex mix of metal styles, varied tempos, and mythic storytelling. Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders ably traded off frontman duties, with the scruffy Hinds taking the spotlight on the epic “The Last Baron” for the snaking guitar solos and the vocal promise that “we can set this world ablaze.” The band also used a video screen to display a dizzying tapestry of sci-fi, fantasy, and new-age mystic images to correspond to the musical twists and turns. After a complete rendition of Crack The Skye, Mastodon launched into selections from their previous albums to round-out their 75-minute set.

Converge, around since 1990 and the band with the longest history of the four, proved to be the most animated on stage during its 40-minute set. Frontman Jacob Bannon punctuated the hardcore, extreme style with spastic movements and sprints across the stage. The Salem, Massachusetts, foursome played selections from their new album, Axe To Fall, including the title track and “Reap What You Sow.” The familiar mathcore pattern was present in these tracks, mixing frantic and ultraslow tempos to maximum cathartic effect.

High On Fire started the show with a punishing 30-minute set in front of an early arriving crowd. The drums-bass-guitar trio plays the type of caveman metal one would imagine the orcs of Mordor would dig. Bare-chested singer/guitarist Matt Pike posed like a muscular guitar god, shredding the solo to “Waste Of Tiamat” and howling like Motorhead’s Lemmy Kilmister on “Rumors Of War,” gruffly declaring over the thundering din that “Evil never sleeps.”

– Jason Scales

You have to feel for The Haunted. The band had a kick-ass North American tour set to kick off this month before, well, shit happened . . . big time.

That kick-ass package became significantly less so March 2nd when both Kylesa and Intronaut announced their intentions to join Mastodon’s spring tour (April 30th at Metro) instead. To add insult to the Swedes’ injuries, Nachtmystium canceled two weeks later when frontman Blake Judd broke a leg. (Haunted still plays Pearl Room, with Merauder and The Agonist, April 13th.)

I caught up with Kylesa guitarist/vocalist Laura Pleasants the day after the Savannah five-piece officially ditched Haunted for Mastodon, and she wouldn’t talk tour swaps but had plenty to say about the group’s (completed by guitarist/vocalist Phillip Cope, drummers Carl McGinely and Eric Hernandez, and live bassist Corey Barhorst) fangoddamntastic new record, Static Tensions, released March 17th by Prosthetic.

M: So Static Tensions leaked?
LP: Oh yeah. Yeah. That’s pretty inevitable, you know? We of course downloaded [the leaked songs] and were just kind of bummed because they just sounded so shitty, especially compared to what I’ve been kinda married to for a few months now, listening to it and playing the songs. We’re really happy with the way it came out, as far as production on it, so we want our fans to be able to get that sense as well and appreciate it.

M: I’ve always been curious how records leak. Is it media people?
LP: Yeah.

IE: Always? It’s always our fault? I got a copy, and I didn’t leak it!
LP: I believe you, man [laughs]. I was told that it’s generally, and I don’t know this for a fact, I was told by someone they sent a bunch of watermarked copies to a bunch of magazine people, but then towards the release date they send out more and more copies, and it’s just inevitable that it’s going to leak, especially with, as I was told, college radio. But you know, it’s inevitable. Records leak. You can check ‘em out, [though]. I always like to get a hard copy of things if I really dig it because I can tell the difference in a shitty, compressed MP3.

M: The reviews have been very positive. Many people are calling it the best Kylesa record yet. Do you agree?
LP: I do agree in that I think it’s our best record. I can honestly say that.

M: The album feels catchier than prior Kylesa material. Especially tunes like “Running Red” and “Nature’s Predators.” Is that a fair assessment?
LP: Yeah, I think so. On some of our past records, a lot of times people’s favorite songs were the catchier ones. We just kind of knew what worked on the past records and what didn’t work. Also, we wanted to write more rockin’ kind of songs, that you can kind of just bang your head to. We either wanted to have a very memorable riff, or a line, and memorable vocals. To me, having a memorable riff in a song or a melody is just as important as having a catchy chorus. We did wanna kind of expand. I think we started that with Time Will Fuse Its Worth but really expanded it with this record.

M: Some heavy bands try so hard to eschew the term “catchy,” Kylesa seems to have embraced it.
LP: It’s not such a bad word. I listen to some of my – I love a ton of punk rock – and some of that is the catchiest shit ever. All that punk stuff has a huge influence on Kylesa. We don’t sound like a punk band, per se, but those influences definitely show up in our music. We’ve been listening to Slayer’s Seasons In The Abyss a lot, and that record is super catchy. That’s my favorite Slayer record, because of its catchiness. And it’s still brutal and heavy. You can be both [laughs].

M: It seems like there is less vocal interplay between you and Phillip and more “your” songs and “his” songs on this record.
LP: Yeah, that wasn’t necessarily on purpose, though, man. That’s kind of just the way the chips fell on this one. We always work out the music first, and then the vocals, and he and I have always written all the vocals and done all the lyrics, and . . . I don’t know. For whatever reason he focused on his vocal parts, and I focused on mine. The only songs I wish I would have done vocals on but didn’t because we ran out of time was “Almost Lost.”

M: In hindsight, do you like the way the vocals turned out doing it differently?
LP: Yeah, I do. That’s not to say that’s how it’s going to be from now on, that’s just how it worked out on this record, but I think the vocals on this record are our strongest. I think Phillip and I worked really hard on improving upon ourselves. We did talk about how we didn’t want to just scream all over the songs – we wanted to put more emphasis on patterns and the actual tone of our vocals and when we should not sing at all and let the music sit by itself and let the drums do the singing or let the guitars do the work. In the past when I was listening to our songs, I was like “Man, there’s just singing all over the place.” And I don’t think there necessarily needed to be. We have enough going on with our music that it doesn’t, we didn’t need it as much.

CONCISE: Though I understand all his points, IE Editor Steve Forstneger and I disagree about Mastodon’s new album. Here’s my official Crack The Skye review in one word: Mindblowing.

REDUX: Think hard (really hard), and you’ll recall a time when In Flames wasn’t mind-numbingly boring. There was also a time when screensavers and Winamp skins were considered CD bonus features. Nuclear Blast remembers both, so it re-released The Jester Race, Whoracle, Colony, and Clayman last month as part of the Reloaded series. This is the second batch of albums in NB’s reissue campaign, reserved for “classic albums.” Calling Colony and/or Clayman (where In Flames started going down the toilet) classic is a stretch, but Jester Race gets the Black-Ash Inheritance EP, which was released the same year as Whoracle, tagged on. Though arguably the band’s best record, Whoracle is only Halfloaded here – just a live version of “Clad In Shadows” and some enhanced stuff. In Flames Windows themes, anyone?

Next to be Reloaded, by the way, are Therion’s Theli and Hammerfall’s Renegade, though no release dates yet.

BUY STUFF: Satan wants us to support independent record stores. Know how I know? He persuaded Slayer to record a new track specifically for Record Store Day April 18th. The band was apparently going to do a track about unicorns but already had the title “Psychopathy Red” sitting around, so it decided to go the Russian-serial-killer (Andrei Chikatilo) route instead. The 7-inch (blood-red vinyl, of course) is limited to 5,000 copies, packaged in a special Russian crime-scene evidence envelope, and available only at participating indie stores. There’s a big ol’ list of Chicagoland locations on www.recordstoreday.com Oh, and the flip side of the 7-inch, according to Recordstoreday.com, is a “weird ass backward tracking song.” Mastodon and Heaven & Hell also have exclusive releases planned for April 18th.

By the way, have you seen the artwork for H&H’s new album? Oh. My. God. Evil. As. Shit. Based on the three new songs the group recorded for the 2007 Dio Years compilation, I’ll be shocked if The Devil You Know (April 28th) isn’t absolutely awesome.

mosh@illinoisentertainer.com

– Trevor Fisher