Call of the Mastodon
The Workhorse Chronicles
Label: Relapse
Rated: NONE
WorkNameSort: Call of the Mastodon
The Workhorse Chronicles

Studio scouts have assigned movies to directors on the strength of short films that didn’t receive a public showing. While clearly imaginative enough to inspire confidence, these clips lose luster when finally unveiled as DVD extras attached to the auteur’s visionary epic. Contextually, a masterpiece casts a colossal shadow over any early output exhumed after its release, making the promising seem rudimentary. Such is the case with Call of the Mastodon, a 28-minute collection of Mastodon’s nascent rumblings.

All the elements that made 2004’s genre-throttling Moby Dick opus Leviathan so seismic – percussive pyrotechnics, a tightly coiled twin-cobra guitar attack, gruff vocals with a ghostly melodic echo – appear here in abridged form. Repetitive riffs threaten to settle into one of the unhurried grooves that made later tunes so trance-inducing, then abruptly change course. It’s a solid entry in what’s looking like a categorically essential catalog, but Mastodon benefited from its evolution from rapid-fire rounds to cannonballs.

The Workhorse Chronicles DVD neatly packages Mastodon’s metamorphosis. It presents the selected songs in chronological order, opening with Call‘s nine tracks before covering 2002’s Remission and Leviathan, but the live performances within each group skip between eras. The Call cuts seem amateurish in grainy footage from a Tallahassee bar in 2000, but “Hail to Fire,” the first composition the group ever wrote, kills at a 2005 Los Angeles gig when bolstered with a dramatic light show and clarion stage production.

Every camera operator, from shaky-handed fans with a back-of-the-bar view to professionals pasting together festival footage, focuses exclusively on drummer Bränn Dailor for lengthy stretches. While many metal drummers derive speed from their pedals, the part of the kit spectators can’t see, Dailor puts on a mesmerizing upper-body display, with constantly extended arms and a swivel-pivot neck. His bandmates attract eyes with ruddy facial-hair formations that resemble geometrically precise fire-ant colonies.

In addition to the extensive live archive, Workhorse Chronicles contains three deeply disturbing videos. “Iron Tusk” earned MTV censors’ ire for its metal-hook-suspended figures, while “Blood and Thunder” casts Mastodon’s hometown friends as clowns, zombies and bearded-lady strippers. Interview splices segue between clips, with singer/guitarist Brent Hinds offering most of his insights from behind a shower curtain.

Career-retrospective DVDs from six-year-old groups seldom justify their existence, but Workhorse Chronicles is a riveting exception, not only because Mastodon took such massive steps between releases but also because its indescribably intense shows demand documentation.

This article appears in Mar 1-7, 2006.