Mastodon at the Norva with The Dillinger Escape Plan and Red Fang

After this show, my brother and I have seen Mastodon four times in the course of four years—first when they toured with Slayer after the release of Blood Mountain (my first non-festival concert), then at Mayhem festival, then co-headlining with Deathklok after the release of Crack the Skye, and now headlining on their own with the release of The Hunter. While Blood Mountain was a pretty commercially successful album, I’ve definitely seen Mastodon grow larger as a band in these four years. When they played Mayhem, they were the second band on the main stage before stuff like Dragonforce and Slipknot. Now, they could probably get top or second billing on that tour. I’ve also seen their live shows rise from being “kind of cool” to “totally awesome” post-Crack the Skye.

The Crack the Skye show will probably always be my favorite because that’s my favorite Mastodon album and they played the entire thing, plus five other songs from each of their other albums. For that show, they also got to utilize the LED monitors used in the Dethklok show which made for some trippy and cool atmosphere.

For tonight’s show, Mastodon showcased more of their heavy songs, though also ones that let them flex their technical muscles. That’s exactly what I expected, having seen interviews where they seem intent on striking this balance during live shows—between songs that are fun to play and songs that are fun for the crowd to mosh to. Since first hearing it, I felt like The Hunter was meant as something with a lot of songs that would be fun to play live in this way. I was surprised, though, that they played such a diverse set, with songs from all of their albums. 

They opened with Dry Bone Valley, which seemed like an odd choice as what I find to be a weaker song from The Hunter, but I think that it might’ve been used for sound testing, since it has vocals from all three band members and such. The biggest problem with the older Mastodon shows that I saw was that they had a hard time mixing the sound well, and stuff often came out sounding like a big muddy mess. Dry Bone Valley sounded a bit messy at first, but by the end it sounded right, so I figure something happened there.

Next they ripped into Black Tongue, the proper opener for The Hunter, tailor-made for headbanging and singing along. At this point, it became clear that the crowd was really into it. This was the first Mastodon show I’ve been to where the whole crowd knew the band and knew their lyrics, which was mega-cool with all the yelling and screaming vocals and “whoa-oh” parts on the new album. 

Next was Crystal Skull, which marked the point where I irrevocably lost all my shit. Here’s a song I go crazy singing and thrashing when I listen to it at home, so in concert it’s double the insanity. This was also where I realize just how many cherished memories I have with this band. I started seeing images in my head of my mom and brother and I rocking out to that song at past shows, in the car, etc. We have a tradition of, when we hear the tribal drums at the beginning, yelling “CRYSTAL SKUUUUULL!!!” and doing so at a live show just gives me the warm fuzzies.

From here on it’s a little harder to reconstruct the song order, so I’ll just throw out songs they definitely played.

Sleeping Giant - Thank god they played this song, because it was a much-needed rest in the middle of the constant intensity and mosh pits that were the rest of the show. Plus it’s badass to hear live.

Capillarian Crest - Another one I went insane to, and here’s where I made a big mistake. I’d pointedly stood next to the mosh pit—I didn’t want to go in, because everyone in there was twice my size and drunk as shit, but I figured I’d get bumped around enough on the outer edge. Unfortunately, I didn’t expect my hair would get caught on… something, I have no idea, but I got dragged a few feet by a mosher before coming loose. After that, I thought I’d better get the fuck away from the mosh pit, and even when I did gravitate back to it, my brother put himself between me and the pit saying “I felt like I had to protect you” LOL (this is my little brother). He was having fun being there, though, so it was cool.

Circle of the Cysquatch - Every time that I’ve seen Mastodon, they played this song, which leads me to believe that it’s their favorite live song. I think the mosh pits were at their most intense for this song.

Colony of Birchmen - I’ve never known why Mastodon likes playing this song live, because it never sounds right. The bass always completely overpowers the guitar and it sounds muddy. This has been true of every time I’ve seen it, including on Letterman.

Ghost of Karelia - My least favorite song from Crack the Skye, and it sort of calmed the audience down a bit, but it’s still pretty cool because the song has a lot of good technical showmanship for the guitarists.

Crack the Skye - What made this song awesome was how everyone in the crowd knew the lyrics and sang along. It has pretty powerful vocals (originally performed by Scott Kelly of Neurosis) and they sounded a lot better here than even on the Crack the Skye tour.

Curl of the Burl - So much fun. Again, the “whoa-oh”s are really what made this cool.

Blasteroid - This song was custom-built for losing your shit hearing it live, and boy did the crowd ever. I think my brother deliberately put himself closer to the mosh pit for this song (which is his favorite by Mastodon). 

All the Heavy Lifting - Pretty cool, I’m not a big fan of the song, but it’s another one with loud and passionate vocals that the crowd was into.

Spectrelight - INTENSE.

Bedazzled Fignernails - I think this was one of the weaker songs on the set, because it’s mostly technical wankery that isn’t all that fun to listen to. However, it did make me suddenly start thinking about Dark Souls, since my brother and I listened to this album a lot while playing that game.

Blood and Thunder - They played this last before the encore, and my brother and I went arm-on-shoulder-fists-in-air retarded for it. This song means a lot to us and our friends. We’ve used it in various videos that we made, would break into it at random amongst friends and sometimes just blast it and go nuts for fun. I even remember a time where I had to walk home from school in the rain and was so tired and soaked that I started screaming the lyrics while walking down the street. I remember when I heard it at that Slayer show and nearly threw myself off the second-floor balcony. Every time I see it live, it’s just got that many more memories attached to it.

I Am Ahab - To be honest, I sometimes have difficulty telling the songs on Leviathan all apart since it’s basically an odyssey of heavy riffs, but I can cetainly say that I was going nuts through all of them.

Iron Tusk - See above.

Megalodon - Particularly legendary to see live because of a famous moment where the guitar goes solo for a twangy country bit and then the song launches into complete insanity. Always gets a great response.

Aqua Dementia - This is one of the hardest Mastodon songs to go nuts to. Here’s where I’ll mention another Mastodon tradition of mine—I tend to try and headbang to the beats that come in weird time signatures exactingly, which is something very difficult for this song and Circle of the Cysquatch, but so much fun.

Where Strides The Behemoth - This was the one song I completely didn’t recognize during the show and had to look it up. I’ve barely listened to Remission at all, but I’m usually prepared for them to play some old stuff.

March of the Fire Ants - Such as this, which I know because it’s another song that they play at almost every show, being a classic fan favorite.

Creature Lives - It was a pleasant surprise to see this as the encore, not only because it’s my favorite song from The Hunter, but because they did it in the most epic way possible. All the dudes from Red Fang, a bunch of roadies, and some guys from Dillinger Escape Plan came out on stage and assisted with the highly vocals-driven song, and it was beautiful. 

After the show, my brother noted how this was the first time the band had taken time during and after the show to speak to the crowd, having simply come out and played their songs other times. Indeed, it was the most fun I’d seen this band have to date. I remember when we saw them at Mayhem, the’d seemed irritated to be playing with the shitty stadium sound system and a crowd who didn’t give a shit. Here, it was energy on stage, energy in the crowd, and a great show.

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As for the Dillinger Escape Plan—I was kind of excited to see them and was disappointed. I knew they weren’t going to play any songs that I like by them, since I most like the really old stuff, especially when they had Mike Patton singing. (They did finish with 48% Burnt though which was cool. “I SMELL THAT WHORE!” was the only vocal I knew in the show LOL). Still, DEP are famous for their high-intensity performances, wherein their always-chaotic sound crosses with everyone on stage going ballistic. These things did happen.

Thing is, the guys in DEP seem like a bunch of douchebags; and I’m not just saying that because the singer and guitarist were goddamn penis-shaped giants. Both of them looked like Gears of War characters. Everyone in the band seemed angry and kind of unhappy to be there. And I can’t blame them—the crowd was unresponsive, if not worse. I noticed a lot of people flat-out left the floor during their set. As in, a good deal of people got sick of watching and just walked away. I’ve never seen this happen to such an extent in the middle of a band playing. There were maybe five guys in the crowd who seemed into it. There was a sizable mosh pit, but those guys didn’t give a shit about the band—they were still moshing when the band left the stage. 

Some parts of the performance were surreal. During one song, the lead singer put one leg up on a front amp, help the microphone directly to his mouth, and twitched his left fingers while shifting his weight up and down, staring straight forward, and stayed that way throughout the entirety of the song. He only did a few things different, such as at one point removing his hand to reveal that the microphone was in his mouth. Another time, he sprayed his spit over the audience, which I just thought was a totally dick move.

One can have no doubt about their energy, though. The singer spent a lot of the first song pissed because the sound guy didn’t seem to understand that his screams were supposed to be Really Fucking Loud, which took a couple of minutes to sort out. He and the guitarists were going nuts, climbing and jumping off of amps, brutalizing their guitars, etc. At one point, the lead guitarist started swinging his guitar around his arm, which made me think, this guy has the strongest guitar strap in the universe. The drummer hilariously had a sparkly, blue, cheap-looking kit with very few parts in spite of his fast and technical drumming. I figured that this was probably because he and the guitarist were beating up the cymbals at the end, so maybe they burn through drum kits with all the violence. 

All in all, I didn’t care for this set.

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Red Fang is a band I’d never heard of, but they seemed like pretty cool dudes. They played a sort of sludgy, doomy traditional heavy metal (metallum calls them “stoner metal” but I find that umbrella too broad). They liked playing with times and had some cool bits. I got some Goatsnake vibes from them, though nowhere near that quality. 

Something I found funny was that they were from Portland. I was totally thinking that with their being old dudes with long beards/hair, playing sludge metal and touring with Mastodon (who are from Georgia), plus having a southernish twang to the vocals, they’d be Southern boys. The only thing that tipped me off was the singer’s hipster glasses. 

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Anyway that was a cool and fun show, but it taught me that yeah, I need to start wearing earplugs and calm the fuck down before I break myself. I shouldn’t leave a show in this much pain lol.

Virginia Beach is the Perfect Mixture

It seems like there are two halves to my city in every regard. Geographically, the top half of the city (which is fairly large altogether) is all suburban and really wants to be urban, if that makes sense. Our tiny neighbor, Norfolk, is the only thing around which can really be called ‘urban’. There’s a patch with a whole lot of big buildings, giant mall, popular music venue, etc., but it’s like this one standalone piece of city that kinda serves as the urban center of the greater Hampton Roads area (at least insofar as VA Beach, Portsmouth, Chesapeake, and Suffolk.)

VA Beach is a big enough city that you could easily drive around the suburban area for a few hours and think you’ve seen the whole city. However, the bottom half of the city is actually a farm-ridden wasteland called Pungo. I’ve only even been through it like twice (not including leaving the state but that’s on the highway). No one ever ends up in Pungo on purpose. Recently, my brother had his first time getting lost while driving, and ended up somewhere in Pungo. I’ve lived in VA Beach for something like 50% of my life, some of which was the past 4 years, and I have no idea how to get to Pungo. 

Now let’s get into social divisions. Our state is almost perfectly split between democrats and republicans, as was demonstrated in the last election where we became a blue state for the first time. I’m sure this is because there are probably enough people between the northern DC area, central Richmond area, and southern Hampton Roads area to greatly outnumber the rest of the state combined. I haven’t been to rural VA very many times, but I can tell you that it’s a fucking wasteland. I had to go to the Western part of the state to a town called Hillsville once because that’s where my grandma is from, and it was like being in an entirely different world. One full of trees and old people. 

It’s sort of mind-blowing, actually, to think about our state’s geography. The entire western border of the state is on a mountain range, and the entire eastern side is on the ocean. Virginia Beach is flatter than any other part of VA that I’ve been to. I can’t remember ever having seen a mountain up close (I did as a baby since my family toured the country with Lollapalooza twice and saw 36 states, but I don’t remember them.) I mean, I literally live right across the street from the ocean (okay, I live across the street from a naval base, but you get the point.) 

I think it’s because of the overall strangeness of this city’s construction that the people here are a perfect mix between city slickers and classic ‘Virginians.’ 

From my experience, I’d say around 40-50% of the city’s population is black. Back in high school, people always said there were more black kids, but I always saw it being pretty even (and those kids don’t know what they’re talking about anyway.) I lived in a city that was North of Richmond for a while and my school was like 80% white; then I lived *in* Richmond for a while and my school was 95% black - very different experiences, but in both cases, I felt like I was in a totally different mental place than everyone else in the school. In VA Beach, I feel like I’m exactly where I should be. Most of the black population, like in Richmond, consists of migrants from New York, so it’s very common to hear people say they’re from Queens and other places like it here. Perhaps that’s how the gangs got here too, since gang violence increases exponentially every year in the Hampton Roads area (Norfolk often shows up near the top of those ‘most dangerous cities in America’ list in spite of being geographically tiny.)

The white part of this city is the old guard, but the last couple generations have been more city-slicker styled thanks to our rapid urbanization. That’s where we get this strange fjord in the kinds of people here. 

I think the city’s class ratio is almost perfectly flat. There are an equal number of high-class, upper-middle, middle, lower-middle, and low class neighborhoods in the area, and the beautiful part is that we all go to the same public schools. I can’t speak for people before my time, but because of our schools, all of the people I’ve known from each class can generally be trusted to act similar and usually get along pretty well. 

When I was in high school, issues like class and race were barely seen. The ‘scene kids’ were mostly white, though not exclusively, and there were a lot of black kids who generally weren’t interested in the goings-on of white people. However, I never saw things like hate crimes and overt bullying based on race/class. My group consisted of people from every class and every race, and we all got along, and best of all, weren’t afraid to make fun of one another. I call my black friends ‘nigga’, I call my Asian friends any of the vast multitude of names we have for them, I give my good friend a ton of shit for being middle-eastern but looking like a Mexican when his hair is cut, and I let everyone make fun of my Jewish heritage (not that it really matters since I’m not a Jew, but my brother and I still have curly hair and big noses.) I personally think that not being afraid to say these things is exactly what tears down the barriers between the races; we can act like we would around anyone else around those people. 

My friends come from every class, which probably also has to do with the fact that I’ve been a part of every class throughout my life. I live in one of the nicest parts of town in a huge house with a gigantic yard, but you only have to take a few steps to be in the suburbs, and a few more steps to be in the shits. There are two neighborhoods in my city that can be definitively called ‘ghettos’ and they exist in these amazing sort of little air pockets right in the middle of everything. The one that two of my friends live in is literally right off of the boulevard, fairly close to the city center. You just turn and BAM, cracked streets, basketball hoops, people walking around in groups at night, etc.

The political divide around here is astonishing to actually watch in action. The last neighborhood I lived in was pretty upper middle class, and we were one of only 2 houses in the neighborhood with Obama signs on our front yard. We were the first house on the road entering the neighborhood, and right on the other side of that road was one of the more dangerous and poor neighborhoods. My brother and I explored the area a lot, and if you got to a certain part where you leave our neighborhood into a lower-middle class one, suddenly every single house had an Obama sign in their yard. 

It’s clearly a divide not just between classes and races, but between ages. My school was overwhelmingly supportive of Obama, with the few McCain supporters usually neglecting to comment because they’d be outright told that the entire class would be pissed at them if they didn’t support Obama. The young people in this area are mostly hyper-liberal and urban-minded, whereas the old people have been here forever and are set in their ways.

Said old people have very little presence in the city, and I think most of them have gotten used to living in a liberal city. I walk around grocery stores with a 3-foot braid, wearing pajama pants, and I don’t get many weird looks. The people who comment on my pajama pants are usually just intrigued and sometimes complimentary.

Back in high school, I was part of the very large goth/nerd clique, and half of the people there claimed to be bisexual. I promise they did it to look cool or fit in with their friends, and so being bi was something our school didn’t bat an eye to. (I only knew a couple of guys or girls who were actually full-on gay, and they weren’t even really in the stupid goth/nerd clique, though it’s hard to define that clique in general.) I actually had one friend who totally didn’t like it when guys so much as touched him, but he pretended to be bi to impress women, and it worked. 

Now I’m attending an art college in Portsmouth with students from all over the Hampton Roads area, and I swear to God half of this freaking school is gay. And this isn’t the same bullshit as high school - these people are *really* gay. Butch lesbians, flaming queens, and they congregate with the geeks in the break room who of course don’t bat an eye at gay people. 

So what is Virginia Beach, anyway? It’s a little bit of everything. It can be 110 degrees and 100% humidity here on some days, and it can be 30 degrees by the end of that week. We have warm days in December, but last year we had a white Christmas. Earlier that year, it snowed in April. We get the last dregs of everyone else’s hurricanes, but it still floods half of our neighborhoods because they’re actually underwater. We’ve got plenty of beaches, but we have people who’ve only been to them once or twice (personally I think the beach is the most overrated thing ever.) We’re big enough that every band comes here on tour, but small enough that we can say ‘there’s nothing fun to do in this town!!!’ Really, there’s probably plenty to do, but it’s hard to find anything because the entertainment districts of the city are all split up and it takes forever to get anywhere. 

It’s a city where a guy can go through his senior year of high school with his hair in a 3-foot braid and wearing pajama pants without getting made fun of, and instead being a well-respected and well-known dude. It’s a city that’s a little boogie and a little pop, and because of that, I’ve always loved it more than any other city I’ve lived in.