Live: Cult of Luna, Death by Stereo, Mastodon

May 14, 2005, Recher Theatre, Towson, Maryland

If I had to review each band with one word:

• Cult of Luna: potential.
• Death by Stereo: fake.
• Mastodon: heavy.

But I'm not contrained to one word, so here are the details. Cult of Luna opened. They started their set with an echo-laden spacerock piece that went several minutes before singer Klas Rydberg even took the stage. I was actually thinking they might be an instrumental group. Once Rydberg began to sing, or growl rather, I wished they were. It's not that he was such a bad vocalist, so much as he was average while the band was actaully quite good and interesting. Drummer Thomas Hedlund was a top notch player and set the pace, which changed frequently, sometimes abruptly and sometimes gradually. Andreas Johansson's bass lines were heavy and plodding which created tension with the crispness of Hedlund's playing. Guitarists Erik Olafsson and Johannes Persson had cool interplay with each other as they went from slow, deliberate downstrokes to spacey leads to eerie harmonics with the frequent use of dissonance, often sounding as if they added more than just two layers to the music. The whole thing was held together with subtle ambient keyboards and samples. Cult of Luna had a lot of extended, seemingly repetitive intrumental parts, but a closer listen revealed the intricacies of careful layering that subtley kept the songs moving. Without the vocals, I'd probably give them 8 out of 10, but I think they lose a point for going the well-traveled road of growling instead of singing. It was still good enough that I bought their latest CD, Salvation, for $10.

Death by Stereo was next up. Over the first several songs, I thought they're a pretty typical hardcore band, maybe a little tighter than most, but nothing extraordinary really. They had an animated singer and a fairly proficient lead guitarist. After the first few though, I realized more and more that there was nothing behind it. The singer's animation was clearly choreographed, because it was the same thing over and over. He pretty much ran through every hardcore pose imagineable and if I had a nickel for evertime he gave the finger...well, you get the picture. The guitarist was a technically good player, but he was completely devoid of emotion. It was quickly apparent that he was about as emotionally tied to what he was playing as he was to what he ate for lunch that day. If I bought into Death by Stereo's act, they'd still only be a good hardcore band. But I didn't buy it at all, so they're just a sad facsimile of a hardcore band. They're what happens when hardcore gets into the hands of the wrong people.

Mastodon didn't have to do much to seem impressive after the lackluster performance of Death by Stereo, but in the end, they didn't need a bad band to make them look good by comparison. They were heavy, heavy, heavy. I mean HEAVY! They were also dynamic, which is something that elludes a lot of heavy bands. Singer/bassist Troy Sanders even looks a little like I imagine Captain Ahab would (which is kinda cool since their recent Levithan album is based around Moby Dick). They played a consistently tight set whether they were slowly trudging or rapidly barrelling through the songs. They managed the energy of their performance well, sometimes steadily pushing and other times nearly obliterating the audience. Guitarists Bill Kelliher and Brent Hinds were both heavy-handed and agile in their playing and even approached something on par with Iron Maiden in some of their leads. Drummer Brann Dailor drove the thunder of Mastodon while remaining rhythmically articulate (no band that manages energy well does it without good drumming, see Led Zep or Screaming Trees for example). I'm pretty sure they were the heaviest band I've ever seen. It's what I expected, it's what I wanted, it's what I got.