Concert Review: Mastodon at the Granada, April 13, 2009

I was at the Granada last night next to the sound board getting ready for Mastodon

to come on, and I’m going to be totally honest here and tell you right now it was pretty unlikely I was going to give this show a bad review. I’ve loved every album they’ve put out — including the one they just released and were rumored to be playing front to back on tour — and didn’t see disliking them unless they completely phoned it in.

I’d like to tell you about how they came on stage and did an amazing show, replicating their studio work astonishingly well while at the same time staying so completely in the moment with one another it was impossible to distinguish the working parts of their music and where one riff or bassline ended and another started.

I’d like to tell you that not only were they technically near-perfect, but they also were a physically imposing stage presence, tossing around guitars and slamming themselves back and forth to the drums. But I can’t tell you any of that because somehow Brann Dailor’s drumming whipped up a temporal field that, upon interacting with the soundboard’s systems, created a wormhole of tachyon particles sucking me back through time and space.