I was supposed to right this about a month ago but things got in the way. Anyway after a long 3 hour drive which consisted of my ipod being played at extreme volumes thru a tape player, we arrived at Manchester university which is about the same size as a small town. When we got to the academy, in the queue there were metal heads.
In my opinion there are two types of metal heads, the close minded who live on a plain diet of metal and theirs the open minded who like a balanced diet of just about any type of music, I could gladly say their was a good balance of fans. When we got inside, the first support band Winnebago deal, who made loud noise with only 2 members, unfortunately for them this didn’t attract the crowds attention much. Maybe if they had a bassist they could make a few heads nod. Next up was thin lizzy soundalotalikes, valiant thorr. We had listened to a couple of their tunes in the car and thought they were not bad, but not good either, but when they came on stage each member sported a sweaty bearded, and had lots of energy, the singer cracked out jokes, ‘this song is about touching something you cant have, im not talking about lava’ and ’strangely their music sounded allot better live which gave them a lot of head nodding attention. After they had got the audience to widely anticipate the arrival of mastodon they left and mastodons roadies took to the stage.
One who I noticed to be the guitarist from brents other band the blood vessels, who sound like a drunk thin lizzy. The crowd caught a glimpse of brents Silhouette in the background and cheered madly. There was a satisfied atmosphere when it came apparent that The roadies put a mic stand near the drum kit, which only meant that the drummer would be singing. They got on the stage and said ‘hi’ then opened up with oblivions with the drummer singing. It now became apparent that they were playing crack the Skye in full. The unnamed keyboardist did an amazing job of holding the songs together which made it sound like one big piece. The highlights included troy doing his best to imitate Scott Kelly’s vocals on the title track and crystal skull(Scott Kelly is the vocalist from neurosis, I recommend you check them out, Kelly has contributed vocals on the past 3 mastodon albums and probably would be a permanent member if he didn’t live in the middle of a forest). Also the new album had more choruses which the audience happily sung along to. After they finished playing the new album they pl played tracks from blood mountain, leviathan and unfortunately only one track from Remission, which was the best song march of the fire ants, which was the closing song. But why no encore? Apparently they usually play the bit by the Melvin’s and emerald by thin lizzy, but not that night. So all in all it was a very enjoyable night, they played a lot of my favorite songs and didn’t play some I wanted, but I didn’t make the set list, did I?
good points:
>valiant thorr were surprisingly good
>great atmosphere
>singing drummer
>played all the new album
>money well spent
>photo with the drummer from valiant thorr
bad points:
>kylEsa would of been better support
>no hearts alive, blood and thunder or any other songs of remission or call of the mastodon.
>no encore
