Mastotool Spectacle in Jesolo

 Last Thursday we headed across the border. To be precise, we went on a pilgrimage to an Italian town, a tourist hub and beach resort right next to Venice. The reason was simple enough: Tool were playing, the prog-art-alt metal phenomenon from the City of Angels. They’ve already played our neck of the woods this year, so plenty of people didn’t bother going to see them again. What did pull people in was the band opening the show. Atlanta’s Mastodon had been a pretty remote name until now. Most people could only admire them on record, while those with a slightly deeper wallet could check out their charms in faraway America. Or at some gig or festival in the far north of Europe. This time both were on offer just a stone’s throw from the Slovenian border. No dilemma there. Except for those who had already emptied their pockets this year and for whom another twenty grand was an unacceptable expense. Hmmm…

Thursday promised rainy weather. The wind had piled up heaps of clouds. There was some doubt too about whether the concert was even real or just another move in Tool’s media games. Plenty gets promised and then doesn’t happen. Still, in the parking lot in front of Ljubljana’s Hala Tivoli, a bunch of fired-up lads and lasses had gathered who’d managed to shake off such doubts. At one o’clock the bus showed up, just as Koncertfreak had promised, and after a headcount the trip finally began. The ride went off without a hitch. After the first introductions and chats, naturally, the last melody from the latest record by the LA heavyweights and the Atlanta surprise faded out of the speakers, and around half past four in the afternoon we actually rolled into Jesolo. The hall where the concert was supposed to happen, the Palasport, stood there with its lights and a small crowd of fans out front, defying the melancholy of the rainy grey. We’d barely parked the bus when the first t-shirt vendors gathered on the road like vultures. The shirts and hoodies, of this or that quality, had one thing in common: the only thing on offer was bootleg Tool shirts. Mastodon was nowhere to be found. Bummer. The doors weren’t due to open until seven, so it was the obligatory beer and then some, followed by waiting. The doors did open at the announced time, and after the obligatory bag check and a handout of warnings about no recording or photography, we finally found ourselves inside the hall, which normally holds around 5,000 people. The first impression didn’t exactly lift the mood. There were only about 800 or 1,000 fans. All the gear stood on the stage, and in the back an enormous screen sprawled with images from Mastodon’s latest record, Blood Mountain. A nice sight. A few more moments and it was on for real.

The lights went down, and in the half-dark (we weren’t exactly lucky with the light show at the start…) Mastodon stepped onto the stage to the sounds of an intro, a spoken-word sample and gongs. Bran Dailor, Bill Kelliher, Troy Sanders and Brent Hinds look completely different at first glance from what you’d actually expect. Used to life on endless tours, they were ready to assault us and convince us of their quality, which has been written in bold, heavy letters from their beginnings to this day. The opener ‘Mortal Soil’ hit with full force. The refined balance of violent and heavy rhythms got crushed out with confidence and uncompromising loudness. The crowd of Italian music lovers? Nothing. The rather static atmosphere didn’t rattle the band, though. Troy Sanders, the bearded bassist who also serves up a good dose of guttural vocals, and Brent Hinds, the scruffy guitarist who’s also armed with a mic, simply did their thing like pros. The rhythm section was a real treat. Brann Dailor, hardcore tattooed look notwithstanding, is closest to jazz drumming, filling the melodic glides with precise, compact salvos. The least noticeable was the other guitarist, Bill Kelliher. Static pays back static. Mastodon played their set without paying too much attention to the audience, which stood rooted in front of the stage, I dunno, maybe waiting for the Messiah to arrive. They let all their demons loose. ‘Wolf Is Loose’ sounded phenomenal, and the choice of the other songs was clever too. Next came the melodic ornament ‘Crystal Skull’ from the latest record, which they tied to cannonades from the same album: ‘Capillarian Crest’, ‘Colony Of A Birchmen’, ‘Circle Of Sysquatch’ and ‘Sleeping Giant’. The last one rang out properly epic and stirred the quiet passions of every living creature that loves music. Then came ‘Megalodon’, a masterpiece from the previous album Leviathan, and for the big finale we were served dessert with ‘Hearts Alive’, and then it was over. The exit from the stage was final. There’s really nothing to hold against them. They played their set very confidently and coherently. Maybe not as invested as they would have been with a slightly livelier response. Maybe we could have had a song or two from Remission. I especially missed the Mastodon ‘hit’ ‘March Of The Fireants’, but I won’t hear that until their next headline show, which they could play all by themselves. You could also gripe that they sounded maybe a little too loud and therefore a little undefined, and that they played too short a set (only 45 minutes), but Mastodon definitely deserve more attention than they’ve gotten so far.

A half-hour break. Beer and fresh air lured me outside, since the techs had to set up the stage for the main attraction anyway. In that time the number of alt-heads grew a lot. Around four thousand Tool-hungry Italians and a handful of Slovenes and Croats got their revelation at 9:15 p.m. The blackout and the intro to the group meditation began. Time to squeeze as close to the stage as possible. Fourth row. The view would be great! Onto the stage came the only Englishman in Tool’s ranks, Justin Cancellor, Dave Carey sat down behind the drums, guitar minimalist and experimenter Adam Jones took the left side of the stage, and then came the extravaganza on two legs, singer and sarcast #1 Maynard James Keenan. This time shirtless and with a huge gas mask on his face… The heretic hunt kicked off with the song ‘Stinkfist’ from Ænima. The passionate directness drew a surge of enthusiasm. The hall was singing along with Maynard from the first verse! The screens were lit up with careful aestheticizations and video projections, which make a Tool concert more like a multisensory shamanic ritual, a group hypnosis and a spectacle, the kind that Pink Floyd, for instance, knew how to stage. They ramped up the intensity with ‘Forty-six & 2’, followed by ‘Jambi’. I bet plenty of singers would feel pretty thrilled that, even though their songs maybe don’t get played all that often on the radio, several thousand people know your every lyric. Maynard stayed pretty cool. It goes without saying that you’ll succumb to the charm and the philosophy, right? They carried the transcendent mood on with ‘Schism’ from Lateralus. ‘Lost Keys’ and ‘Roseta Stoned’ followed. The first mosh pits started breaking out all over the hall. The reason was the Undertow argument ‘Sober’. The ending came in static and a shrill whistle calling for a halt to the offensive. Tool sat down on the platform in front of the drums. They picked up lighters. Flames started burning all over the hall. Like an imitation of a starry sky, the lighter flames gave the moment a sense of intimacy and eroticism. Maynard asked the crowd not to use flash during the next song. By the way, cameras flashed despite the warnings. Security dutifully confiscated at least ten of them. That’s just how many I counted myself. The peak of the evening had arrived. An epic farewell to a dead mother and at the same time an invitation to voyeuristic gazing into Maynard’s moments of grief over the loss, plus a philosophical questioning of the meaning of life and death. ‘Wings for Marie (Pt 1)’ and ‘10.000 Days (Wings Pt 2)’, joined into one whole, were intense, piercing and sincere. Green lasers cut through the thick darkness and wove a net over the auditorium. Nobody was left uncaught. Angels took flight into the sky. The transcendence had to go on. ‘Lateralus’ and ‘Vicarious’ signaled the big finale. The two-hour marathon was wrapped up by the closing song, phrase and critique in the form of a song, ‘Ænima’. Wash us all away! The end and the cataclysm. The lights came on and exposed our vulnerability. The lights revealed their greatness and destruction, since we won’t get anything more than what they gave us this time until next time. The question is when. With Tool it happens in intervals. Honestly, all I can say is that I was left speechless already after the Bologna show. Compared to Jesolo, that was only a pale prelude that hinted they’re big. The confirmation of their ability to bring crowds to ecstasy and group orgasm was empirically delivered only now. Tired and wrung out, we climbed onto the bus with nothing but smiles on our faces and counted the tremors of tectonic plates shifting. Esotericism, the philosophy of transcendence and above all aestheticization pushed to its extreme limits! Do you need one more reason to dare to go on a pilgrimage next time to the holy places known as Tool world?