MASTODON Hard At Work On Follow-Up To 'Crack The Skye'

Jon Wiederhorn of AOL's Noisecreep recently conducted an interview with drummer Brann Dailor of Atlanta progressive metallers MASTODON. A couple of excerpts from the chat follow below.

Noisecreep: On the progress of the songwriting sessions for the follow-up to 2009's "Crack the Skye":

Dailor: "We've got a Pro Tools rig set up and [guitarist] Bill [Kelliher's] been learning how to use that. We're recording bits and pieces and stringing up three or four riffs together and testing them out. It's super-heavy and it sounds killer, so it doing what it's supposed to do. It's doing what every other MASTODON song has done for us. We really just try to play music that we dig and that's bad-ass. Our approach has always been exactly the same, and we've learned that we need to do it that way. Otherwise, it's just not right."

Noisecreep: Guitarist and vocalist Brent Hinds seemed to take the reins musically on the initial songwriting for "Crack The Skye". Is that the formula you're working with this time?

Dailor: I think it's a little more collaborative, with everyone chipping in. Brent has a lot of great stuff. [Guitarist] Bill [Kelliher]'s got a lot of cool riffs, too. There are so many, it's hard to know which ones we're gonna use. But we go in and jam all the time and record stuff. Then we sort it out later.

Noisecreep: Can you describe the general vibe of the material so far?

Dailor: It doesn't seem as proggy. There's moments, but it seems more riff-oriented. It seems a little more stripped down. [2004's] "Leviathan" was a little more stripped down, and it feels like that to me. Everything always changes once you go in the studio, but at the moment it seems like a really super-heavy LED ZEPPELIN or something. It has a lot of that [John] Bonham-esque groove to it, but really heavy and dark. I really like playing like that, and when it goes into those parts, I'm psyched.

Noisecreep: Do you have a producer in mind?

Dailor: We do and he said he'd do it, but nothing's finalized and we still have to meet with some other people just to make sure. But for us, we don't need that much production. We just need to get in a room with somebody and hit record, and if they have some cool ideas, that's cool too. But I don't feel we lack any vision as a band. We usually have everything mapped out, as far as how the story line goes and what the visual imagery looks like. And that kind of plays in your head along with the riffage. We're pretty good at arranging and making the parts flow as a song. We just kind of need somebody to put the mics in the right spots and make it sound great and feed our egos as we go along.

Read the entire interview from Noisecreep.