Mastodon blew my fuck­ing mind for two hours last night. For the major­ity of the show I was in the pit. At one point I was pushed over a dude right as he fell down and received an elbow to the face that popped a lens out of my glasses. I found it after the show, but it was scratched to the hell I’d fig­ured it would be. This is the sec­ond time I’ve seen Mastodon, and they are so much bet­ter live than on-​album. It was a hard sell to get me to be a fan, before I’d ever seen them live I con­sid­ered Mastodon to be naught more than excel­lent tech­ni­cal play­ers rock­ing out in the overly-​pretentious Malmsteen-​style.

I’ve cer­tainly changed my mind: now I think they do what they do in the man­ner they do as a nat­ural prod­uct their col­lec­tive cere­bral cor­tices. I recently fin­ished watch­ing Sergei Eisenstein’s Ivan the Ter­ri­ble I and II, and totally wigged to see Mastodon use clips from that film in their video back­drop. I had to Ask MetaFil­ter for guid­ance regard­ing other films that were used in it.

When­ever I make it to a metal show, I just get a rein­forced sense that I will always fun­da­men­tally be a met­al­head. The surg­ing sea of human­ity inevitably drenches me in other people’s beer and other people’s sweat. The con­cept of per­sonal space is oblit­er­ated. Peo­ple tend to much more self-​conscious at indie shows. Any­thing more than an arms-​crossed head-​bob seems vastly out of place.

Mastodon played the entirety of Crack the Skye and bits of Blood Moun­tain, Leviathan and Remis­sion. Here’s some video of the first song they played: Oblivion.