The Future-uture-uture of Heavy Metal (Part 1)

Well, hello there, you beautiful mother punchers, you bastards of reality, you B40. And welcome to AND Volume for All, a deeply reverent and lovingly irreverent exploration of the history, philosophy, and future of the greatest music in the world, heavy metal. First things first, let me go through my agenda items here real quick. History. Philosophy? Czech. Franz Kafka? Also check that. And that only leaves one topic to go. And where we're going, we don't need roads.

So it's either rural Mississippi or the future. This is episode four, the future oocher oocher of heavy metal. Ooh, it just felt like char. Thank you all for your incredible responses on Twitter about the bands you consider to be the future of this art. The interactions I've had with so many of you about the music and artists that you love and the vigorous debate over vinyl versus CD and whether or not I should ever be allowed out in public again does is a pretty resounding no.

There have been outstanding. And I've learned a butt truck in the last few weeks and discovered so much great music that I would have never heard were it not for you. So thank you. And in addition to all of that, if you would like to leave, and volume for all, a five-star review on Apple Podcasts or Spotify, You know what? I'll come to your house.

And I'll mow your goddamn lawn, Chester. I was only planning on doing four episodes of this podcast, and this episode, the one you are currently listening to, right now, while mowing the lawn, Debbie was going to be the series finale in which Tyrion Lannister would inexplicably crown me King of Westeros, despite the fact that I had clearly entered a dissociative state at the end of season seven.

But this is not the end, my only friend, because we're just gonna flip this fucker over to the B-side. Or hit skip track. That's what you prefer. See? I'm learning. In the coming weeks, I'm gonna start doing some single-issue episodes, like the metal vocal episode I teased last time, and I'm gonna have some special guests. Believe it or not, I think actual humans will want to talk with me in real time about metal, and one of them might be you.

No no, sorry, not not you. I was talking to the listener behind you there. Yep, left shoulder. That's them, right there. I I'm sure you're lovely too, but you know. We'll see. I could get desperate. The point is this is not the end. This is just the end of the beginning. Or the beginning of the end. Look, this episode could be the high water mark for and volume for all. That moment right before the pod turns to real shit.

And we're living in it. It's our Abbey Road, our ninety-eight season with the Bulls. Our second to last painting Picasso did that was way better than the one that he did after. So let's talk about the future of heavy metal today with full heart. and empty slogans because at any moment, this podcast could easily just evolve into me ruining minor league baseball for everyone, surrounded by mediocre cubist art, while Digapony plays on an endless loop. But not yet. Not today, oh no lord, not today.

I want to begin episode 4, where we left off at the end of episode 3, part 3, namely the mid-2000s, or as no one should call them, the Because a little before halfway through that first decade of the twenty-first century, I think you can see the individual threads of what will define the future of heavy metal. Starting to weave themselves together. And it's the beginning of what I think is a true renaissance for the genre.

I would also argue that not only are we still in the midst of this golden age, but by all indications, it's just getting better. But now that I think about it, we probably shouldn't call it a golden Yeah, our color. Black age? Black Age is cool. But it sounds a little bit like blockage and makes me feel vaguely racist. Maybe Obsidian Age, Umbrous Age. Ooh, Dark Age. Wait. No, yeah, Dark Age. I don't see a single downside. Whatever, we'll workshop it at the retreat in October.

Every day on Metal Twitter I see different people. with wildly differing musical tastes lamenting the lack of available hours in the day compared to the sheer volume of ridiculously high-quality releases and the artists producing them. Some of them are our standard bearers or personal favorites, but an overwhelming number are new or new-ish. And no, it doesn't count if the band's dad was newish.

It has to be passed down on the mother side. I see the same sentiment from Doom and Stoner fans, Black and Death fans, Metalcore and Prague fans. Ceiling and bread fans all saying the same thing. There is so much good shit coming out right now that we can barely keep up. It's like the zombie hordes from World War Z, or the Borg from Star Trek, if you, you know, never had sex. Which brings me to the year of our Lord, his heaviness, I owe me a don't I haare? two thousand and four.

New Metal was still loitering around the gas station bathroom of popular music, and while Puddle of Mud's two thousand three release Life on Display featured a number one hit single,

The album was a commercial and likely personal disappointment for the band members' parents. Meanwhile, Stained had three top 100 singles and a number one album in 14 Shades of Grey, which despite terrible reviews, only grew in numbers, adding thirty-six more shades by the year 2011 and transforming into a book about dirty stuff that its middle-aged audience was physically incapable of performing.

Joining their two handsy uncles in the top five Why are my ice i you know what? It's never made a goddamn sound. All of a sudden I start recording, I have a little bit of ice with some whiskey in it, and it's just going fucking ham. Why would I live in fucking Greenland? Stop!

But it is delicious. Joining their two handsy uncles in the top five Billboard Mainstream Rock Artists of two thousand three was the unfortunate offspring of an incestuous three way between pop, rock, and metal, And the only Canadians Americans don't feel guilty about hating, nickelback.

At this point in my life I was twenty four and rediscovering the Beatles and David Bowie and drifting away from metal toward what I thought were more fertile pastures, notable exceptions being System of a Down, Songs for the Deaf era, Queens of the Stone Age, and Mouth. I wasn't really into Pantera yet, or any independent metal acts at the time, so indie rock and hip-hop were just getting me through the interim between radio head albums.

I felt like the transition from new metal to a new metal wasn't going well. And the genre that first kindled my love of music was now the guy who opens his first beer on your couch at 3 a.m. when you're just trying to clean up after the party that he wasn't invited. I'm sorry to call you out like this, Devin, but you gotta fucking go, man.

It's late. So I checked out on metal for a couple of years because, as I think you all know philosophically, I'm really fascinated with where metal encroaches on the territory of the popular consciousness. and the metal that was popular around the new millennium

was not my thing. I was therefore tragically unaware that a progressive metal quartet from Georgia had released a sophomore album that, in my current and fumble opinion, Was the spark that would light the flame of the heavy metal renaissance about to be unleashed upon the unsuspecting world of popular music?

Their next two records would be the best selling of their career, and continue to gardener gardener, continue to gardener them. Because it's metal and gardening for me. It's just me and my petunias. But doonia. Their next two records would be the best-selling of their career and continue to garner them universal critical praise. But I want to start with that second album. A loosely structured conceptual ek I'm sorry, I thought I just said conceptual.

Did I say conceptual? Check the tape. You know what? Don't check the tape. Check yourself. You wreck yourself. But I want to start with that second album, a loosely structured conceptual exploration of the nautical and existential themes in Herman Melville's literary masterwork, Moby Dick. A story of obsession, paranoia, revenge.

and the dark side of murdering one of nature's last remaining miracles and exploiting their corpses to stave off the temporary inconvenience of not being able to read at night. Two thousand four's Leviathan was the first in a trilogy of albums that I I think ought to be considered alongside the most important triads in the history of heavy metal. In two thousand nine, a shamelessly self-promoting music critic named James Monger,

And boy, it'll be a miracle if anyone gets that joke. James Monger of AllMusic called the band one of the most original and influential American metal bands to appear in the 21st century. Upon its release, Leviathan was a ubiquitous presence on the top ten lists of fucking every metal publication, with both Revolver and Kerrang naming Leviathan as their album of the year.

In 2009, Pitchfork ranked Leviathan as 126th best album of the 2000s, but knowing Pitchfork, number one was Elmo Goes to the Grocery Store as chosen by a dolphin wearing a hat. impenetrably weird is a brand, I guess. That same year, Metal Sucks polled musicians and industry professionals for their list of the 21 best albums of the 21st century so far, and Leviathan was their collective choice for number one.

Rolling Stone ranked the album at 46th on their list of the 100 greatest metal albums of all time. But again, grain of salt here, because number one was Black Sabbath's Paranoid, Taylor's version.

It sure is, Slim. This is Blood and Thunder by the Bell.

I'll get to Brent in a minute. I want to play another little clip from this album, and this is not because I think Mastodon is the future of metal, but I do think they exemplify one of those threads. of this Renaissance that's common among a lot of the bands that I'm gonna talk about. Some of your bands, actually.

In terms of the genre, Mastodon can best be described as a stoner-sludge psychedelic death alternative groove thrash band who frequently includes elements of jazz country classic rock and hardcore punk into their instrumentation. Before members of Mastodon brought in such a wide variety of influences to their sound, Braun was a Sabbath priest devotee. He even thanked those two bands by name in his first Grammy acceptance speech for, quote, inventing heavy metal.

He's not wrong. Bill brought in the punk sludge vibes while Troy brought in chicken's blood on the skulls of rival tribesmen, and Brent brought some classic rock and good-o' Southern country chicken pig. He started out playing the banjo, and you can hear it in his style. He he plays this ominous banjo intro for a song called Divinations on Crack the Sky. And unless Ned Beatty is slowly floating down a river that runs past your front porch, it's hard to make a banjo sound ominous.

Check out this weird little left turn that Brent makes on a song called Megalodon. It's strange and surprising and just exactly what it should be.

But lest you think of Mastodon as the midaclorians of metal having come out of fuckin' nowhere to confuse and upset millions, I have to give credit to the scene from which they emerged. Sister Band's Baroness and Black Tusk. Who were kind of the blue cheer of this quatrain emerged from the music scene in Georgia around the same time as Mastodon.

While Barness has had a similar, if slightly less spectacular trajectory toward becoming a preeminent act in modern metal, Black Tusk has been both consistent to a fault and just plain old unfucking luck. If you were to ask a stranger to listen to Mastodon's debut next to their latest album, like if you were just to walk up to somebody on the street and go, Hey Charles, you wanna you wanna listen to two Mastodon albums in a row?

and their name is definitely Charles, but they haven't gone by that in years, so they kinda know that you're just using them to get to the point of your example. They might not realize it's the same band, let alone an identical lineup. But then there's Black Tusk, whose first album was produced by Baroness frontman John Baisley, who also does the artwork for every Black Tusk album.

as well as every Baroness album, in addition to albums for Caveller Talk, Pig Destroyer, Skeleton Witch, and Flight of the Concords, because apparently the man never sleeps. He Sadly, Black Tusk began as a little known sludge band and remain one to this day. Of the three bands that emerged from the sludge of Savannah, which by the way was the Nommed Plume I chose during my competitive eating days.

Black Tusk has been the least consequential as a result of being the least expansive. I don't fault Black Tusk for sticking to their lane. They are great at it. And they play sludge metal for a living. It's what I'd do if I had an iota of musical talent or heroin addiction, but they do stand out as something of a cautionary tale.

for those bands who hope to influence the future of the genre. And then in twenty fourteen their bassist was in a horrific motorcycle accident and eventually had to be taken off of life support in the hospital. So their story is Unfortunate, but their discography is great and you should check them out. I really like Black Time. The fourth and final ban associated with the Georgia sludge scene is my sleeper favorite and one of the most underrated acts in heavy metal, I think.

says me. Or they were until they announced an indefinite hiatus in twenty sixteen because everything I ever love leaves me in the end. But they left one hell of a legacy behind them, including one of my favorite trilogies in Modern Metal. In 2006, They released Time Will Fuse Its Worth. Full on sludge metal head trip stitched together with psychedelic interludes.

Static Tensions in two thousand nine, in which the band adds a third set of vocals to its dueling drummers, and frontwoman Laura Pleasants begins to incorporate her haunting clean vocal croon. into the band's burgeoning experimentation with psych rock. And finally, Spiral Shadow in 2010, the bridge between Kyless's sludgy past and the psychedelia that will dominate their final two releases. Man, that sounds shitty to say. And it's not just because I hate the sound of my own mouth.

part of it. It's not only it. According to Metacritics, Spiral Shadow was the best-reviewed metal album of 2010, with a majority of critics extolling the virtues of the band's hybridization of Sludge and Psychock into a flawless synthesis of the two styles.

And here is my favorite track from Spiral Shadow.

Here it comes, bring in Bob Rock with some verse chorus, verse chorus, bridge chorus, clean singing, four-minute ballad, bullshit, and three albums. Later we'll have to watch a documentary about their fucking feelings. Go ahead. Ruin it all for us, you sell.

I never got how Zindy Lu fit into the plot, but they're the geniuses. Blood Mountain was my reentry into the atmosphere of heavy metal because Mastodon sounded like something new. My brother recommended the album to me, and because I love my brother and always follow his lead on music, even when it's stupid and awful, I bought the CD. So when I first heard it, I thought, what the fuck has Armano gotten me into?

I listened through a few times and it was just all too much for me because I couldn't hear it yet. As Friedrich Nietzsche said, new ears for new music. He also lost his mind and fell in love with a horse at one point, but he's right about the ear thing. At the time, the war for my musical heart was a battle between arcade fire and vampire weekend. And to all my goths listening out there, don't listen to Vampire Weekend. They are decidedly not the droids you're looking for.

But one day I decided to give the old beard metal bastards one more try, and the album sounded disappointingly as it had before. Until I got to this.

Hey, and speaking of weird shit people do for seemingly no reason at all, Brett Hines. Mastodon's lead guitarist is well he's the one with the tribal face tattoo, and I think That's illuminating. Honestly, he's one of the most fascinating characters in modern metal, and I probably spend way too much time hoping that he's okay.

Just to give you a sense of the old yin and yang of Brent, he wrote the music for the third album in that musical trilogy that I talked about, Crack the Sky, while lying on his back in a hospital bed. and then his couch, with terrible Vertigo having just emerged from a twenty-eight-day coma after he got drunk and tried to love fight System of a Downs bassist Shava O'Dajun after the Las Vegas VMA.

Shavo said Heinz was saying, I love you, I love your bass playing, while also trying to tackle him before taking a swing at Shavo's friend. There's a weird scuffle that happened and then Brent fell and smashed his head on the curve. In two thousand nine he told Spin Magazine, All I remember is walking through the Mandalay Bay with my shirt off. Yeah, see

That's the problem right there. I am uh fairly certain that like 98% of all global conflicts are started by a drunk guy taking off his shirt. Battle of Trafalgar. For example, Napoleon lit up on Pinot, was like, Eh time to freeze these mantities, no? Haha There's a this a there's a lot of buttons on this shirt, huh? Ah fuck it, let's conquer the world. Heinz continued, then I remember being asleep for three days. When I woke up, it hurt like fuck.

And just so you get a clear picture of Brent Hines here, he then offered, The doctor said I had to quit drinking for a couple of months. I was back doing drugs and everything by 28.

So I'm a dude? Do I have to fight Matt Pike? Anyway, so that's Brent, and all the other members of Mastodon just openly talk about how difficult it is to be in a band with him, including Brent. He once offered, I'm sure I get on their nerves. If I was married with kids and we had a member who was crazy as fucking batchit balls. After a while, it would get on my nerves. When I was prepping this episode, my brother Ryan reminded me that he met Brent in the line to get a picture auto.

My nephew was a big Mastodon fan at the time, so when Ryan got up to the front of the line, Brent asked him, Who do I make it out to? My brother said, Uh, to my son, Reese. Brent signed it and handed back the picture, which now read To my son, Reese Hart Brent.

Anyway, now that I've mentioned Mr. Pike and Mr. Homie, I probably need to tell you about another scene that developed years earlier in the deserts of California, specifically Palm Desert, California. where a kind of artistic collective began gathering in the arid vacuum between major cities in California in the late eighties and early nineties. Palm Desert is around two hours drive from LA and San Diego, or be there in twenty minutes.

In California time, and offered musically inclined wayward youths a gathering place to refine and own their sound with like-minded individuals. Because when you're all taking the same drugs, you tend to be like-minded. Where does one plug in a

Generator parties, as they would come to be known, were the birthplace of some of Modern Metal's most influential acts, including the quartet of John Garcia on vocals. Josh Hami on guitar, Nick Oliveri on bass, and Brandt Bjork on drums. Originally known as Katzenjammer, a German word describing what I believe is sleepwear for kittens.

they eventually settled on a much cooler moniker, discovered in the least cool of places, a monster manual source book for the Advanced Dungeons and Dragons role-playing game. And as an old school D and D nerd, I can tell you there's only one role you have to play at a desert bonfire and generator party, my friend, and that is

Friend's own Fred, with an intelligence of 18, constitution of 5, and all the charisma of a bugbear trapped in a perpetual death scream forever on display at the center of a gelatinous cube. This is Caius.

The astronomically high priests of Sabbath worship formed by Matt Pike on guitar, Al Cisneros, the guy behind the counter of the coolest local bookstore in every city, on bass and vocals, and behind the kit, one Chris. Huck yes! Haki Hakius Hy Haikus. Let's go with Haikus. Here's a haiku about Chris haikus. Unpronounceable. The drummer's name from sleep. He would be replaced with the But if you were one of my friends that regularly listens to this podcast and isn't a metalhead, can

You should check out Dope Smoker by Sleep without smoking any dope and try to figure out what the fuck is going on. Cause that would be funny. Sleep's second album was a groundbreaking musical achievement that would reverberate for decades to come in the ears of its adherents. And it was pretty influential too.

This is Dragonite.

Brent Heinz wrote the majority of the music for one of my favorite albums of all time across all genres, and what I think is Mastodon's Magnum opus, Crack the Sky.

Eventually he did, and the combination of pain and anger surrounds that loss is so present on this alpha Crack the Sky has both an artistic scope and an emotional depth that is nearly impossible to achieve and absolutely impossible to maintain. If you're seeing any shades of my affinity for and Justice for All here, well

You're not wrong. And you'd be forgiven for thinking Wish You Were Here was my favorite Pink Floyd album because it is, and when someone doesn't do anything wrong, I find it very easy to forgive them. All three of those albums are haunted by the empty space where someone who was close to the band members used to be. The title track features newly uncomfortable subject Scott Kelly.

As a guest vocalist, who before recording began an email correspondence with Braun's father about Skye's life and her untimely death. Kelly said that he put up her father's words in the studio as well as a picture of Skye that he was given during the exchange. I'm gonna read some lyrics before I play Scott Kelly's final verse on the song. The first voice you'll hear is the bassist, Troy, who sings Desperate Heathens flock to Cyrus.

Guard your heartache well. And Kelly finishes his contribution with this line: Mama, don't let them take. Don't let them take her down. There's another phrase on the track that isn't in the liner note, so I can't be certain what it says, but it it's always sounded to me like the phrase at least alone. So that the lyrics would read, Mama, don't let them take her, don't let them take her down, at least alone, implying that the narrator here doesn't want his sister to go unless he goes with her.

When we come back. I am going to lay out conceptual pillars of heavy metal yet to come, cover some of the bands you suggested may lead the way. And give you my four examples of artists that I believe possess the ability to weave the threads of heavy history into the tapestry. When we