Prog-influenced metal bands Mastodon and Gojira bring tandem tour to Concord Pavilion
CONCORD -- Two leading lights of progressive heavy music share the stage at the Concord Pavilion when Mastodon and Gojira bring their current co-headlining tour to the East Bay on April 20th.
The groups may approach music from different perspectives -- Mastodon plays a decidedly heavy mix of metal, hard rock and prog, while Gojira combines elements of progressive rock and technical death metal -- but the pairing of the modern metal giants makes perfect sense.
Delivering an innovative style of heavy music that draws on hardcore punk, '70s prog and sludgy '90s metal, Atlanta-based quartet Mastodon has been making its unique style of pummeling hard rock for the better part of a quarter century.
Coming together when former members of noise-punk band Today is the Day Brann Dailor (drums) and Bill Kelliher (guitar) met Troy Sanders (bass) and Brent Hinds (guitar) at a High on Fire show in 2000, the musicians discovered they had a mutual interest in iconoclastic sludge-rock outfits Neurosis and Melvins as well as the twin-guitar hard rock of Thin Lizzy. Though the band originally had a singer, by the time the group issued its debut Lifesblood EP on Relapse Records in 2001, the band had trimmed down to its current four-piece line-up.
Their first proper album Remission followed a year later, establishing Mastodon as a force to be reckoned with. Powered by the technically accomplished fury of Dailor (who plays like original Slayer drummer Dave Lombardo channeling jazz giant Elvin Jones) and featuring the labyrinthine riffs cooked by by Hinds and Kelliher, the group put out one of the most talked about metal albums of 2004 with their widely praised sophomore effort Leviathan. A conceptual recording that drew inspiration from Melville's epic "Moby Dick" and Dailor's avowed affection for progressive rock, the pulverizing album topped many year-end "best of" lists and is still hailed as a masterwork over a decade later.
The band would continue exploring concept albums on the next two recordings, branching out with a wider palette of sounds that embraced psychedelia on 2006's epic Blood Mountain and its follow-up, the emotional 2009 opus Crack the Skye that found the band going even deeper. Inspired in part by the suicide of Dailor's sister when she was only 14, the album unspooled an allegorical tale revolving around astral projection, Stephen Hawking's wormhole theories, the exploration of the spirit world and the planned assassination of the mad monk Rasputin in Czarist Russia.
While Mastodon would depart from the concept album template for their next two efforts exploring a more traditional hard-rock sound -- 2011's The Hunter and Once More 'Round the Sun in 2014 -- the quartet's 2017 salvo for Warner Bros. Records marks a return to using an album to tell a thematic story. A rumination on time and mortality that was heavily influenced by the battles with cancer being fought by several friends and family members -- including Kelliher's mother, who succumbed to the disease the year before -- the album follows the tale of the protagonist who has been sentenced to die in a malevolent desert by an evil sultan.
Emperor of Sand featured some of Mastodon's most intricate and pop-minded vocal performances yet, while still embracing the crushing riffs and complex time signatures that have become their trademark. The effort became the band's third Top 10 release in a row, placing high on several Billboard charts while marking Mastodon's biggest international debut of the group's career.
The band faced the same challenges as all music acts did during the pandemic shutdown of concerts and touring, but the quartet channeled it's energies into the recording studio. After issuing the compilation Medium Rarities that featured soundtrack cuts, covers, live tunes and one unreleased new song in 2020, Mastodon put out the sprawling 90-minute double-disc set Hushed and Grim -- which serves as an epic tribute to former manager Nick John, who passed away from cancer in 2018 -- the following year to another round of ecstatic reviews.
Last time around, Mastodon was joined by fellow modern prog-metal icons Opeth at the Fox in Oakland. This time, the group is taking its current co-headlining Mega-Monsters Tour with French metal band Gojira to even larger venues like the Concord Pavilion. The group has been pushing the boundaries of metal with its neck-snapping, stop-start riffs and intricate rhythmic onslaughts for going on three decades. Formed in 1996 in the small southern France city of Bayonne by guitarist/singer Joe Duplantier and his drummer brother Mario, the group then known as Godzilla forged a sound weaving together threads of thrash, technical death metal and progressive metal.
After releasing a series of demo tapes and touring in support of established extreme metal acts like Cannibal Corpse and Immortal, the group was legally forced to change its name, switching to the Romanized version of the Japanese monster Gojira in time for their debut album Terra Incognita in 2001.
Favorable reviews led to more touring opportunities as the band began to make inroads into the U.S., opening for the likes of Children of Bodom, Machine Head and Lamb of God. Subsequent efforts like the concept album From Mars to Sirius and the brutal 2008 recording The Way of All Flesh found the band rising to the level of experimental metal contemporaries like Mastodon and Opeth in terms of sonic density and complex rhythm patterns without sacrificing melody.
While earlier albums focused on environmental concerns -- they sang about the Great Pacific Garbage Patch on "Toxic Garbage Island" on The Way of All Flesh -- Gojira's recordings have moved on to more spiritual and philosophical matters. Tracked in the band's newly adopted home base of New York City, the group's 2016 Roadrunner Records release Magma was colored by the passing of the Duplantiers' mother during the recording process.
Dialing back some of the technical ferocity of the past and featuring more melodic, clean vocals, the songs on Magma zero in on a minimalist yet more accessible approach. "Silvera," "Pray" and the stunning title track match monstrous riffing to equally weighty emotional heft that made the album one of the band's most cathartic and powerful to date.
The band commenced writing songs for its follow-up effort in 2018, but that work was put on hold as the band focused on touring, playing festival dates in Australia, North America and Europe as well as some shows with Guns 'n Roses and Mastodon. Writing resumed the following year with recording completed by early 2020, only to have COVID interrupt the creative process after the band convinced renowned mixing engineer Andy Wallace (The Cult, Slayer, Prince, Bruce Springsteen, Sepultura, Nirvana, Sonic Youth, Rage Against the Machine among many others) to come out of retirement to mix the album.
The pandemic shutdown and complications surrounding Wallace's vulnerability due to his age further slowed the mixing process, eventually delaying the release of Fortitude until April of 2021. Widely praised as a return to the band's earlier heaviness without sacrificing the accessibility heard on Magma, the album would top a number of "Best of" lists for the year. Opening the Mega-Monsters show at the Pavilion is New Jersey deathcore group Lorna Shore, who have been making their corrosive style of music since forming in 2009.
Mastodon and Gojira with Lorna Shore
Thursday, April 20, 7 p.m. $18-$232
Concord Pavilion
