Friday, Jan 14, 2022 • 42min

"Blood and Thunder" by Mastodon

Strong Songs

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Kirk Hamilton

00:01

When playing guitar, how you mute the string is just as important as how you strike it and the best guitarists are experts at muting their strings. A muted string is rarely entirely quiet and as it happens, some of the hardest hitting rock is played by guitarists who have mastered the mute.

00:23

Welcome to Strong Songs, a podcast about music. I'm your host, Kirk Hamilton and I'm so glad that you joined me for another year of palm-muting, finger-muting and wide open, beautifully vibrating guitar strings.

00:36

Strong Songs is a listener supported show, you probably know that already. That means that you will make it possible for me to keep working on this show and making it. If you want to support the creation of Strong Songs, there's a Paypal link for donations in the show notes. You can also become a Patreon at ’patreon. com/strongsongs’.

00:53

On this episode, we're kicking off Strong Songs year for with a bang; taking on the hardest hitting rock tunes have yet covered on the show. It's time to kick up the game, kick up the intensity and drop our tuning down a step. So leap off the mountain and enter the pit, let's do this thing!

01:28

The whole notion of musical genres can be frustrating and limiting or at least I kind of feel that way about it. Even while I acknowledge that it can be useful to have a shorthand when talking about various musical styles, but when it comes to rock and roll, there's a sort of steady trajectory of hardness that increases as the

gain

starts climbing, the instruments get more distorted and the players get more aggressive.

01:51

You can think of it like a map, like one of those hand-drawn maps you might find in the opening pages of a fantasy novel. There's the mellow meadows, then a thicker forest, then steep foothills and finally looming over it all, hard mountain. Leading through that realm is a path and the path leads ever upward as the music grows heavier and heavier as the altitude climbs. So let's take a stroll down that path toward hard mountain, shall we?

02:16

The path starts in the mellow meadows of pop and folk, where the guitars are acoustic, where music can have a nice bounce and a lot of momentum, but it's more delicate. doesn't really hit you in the face.

02:35

That's a nice place to hang out there in the mellow meadows, but maybe you decide you want to keep moving down that path toward the mountain; maybe you want to make things just a bit harder.

02:46

Maybe had a little bit of crunch to one of the guitars, just dial up the

gain

a little bit and before you know it, you've moved out of the realm of folk and pop and into the forest of rock and roll.

02:60

Well now you're entering the foothills and things have certainly gotten harder. There's grid on the guitars, there's a pulse behind the groove that wasn't there before. A bit of stomp, a bit of swagger, a bit of rock.

03:15

But you know, maybe that's not enough. Maybe you want to stay on that path. Maybe you want to climb the mountain. Maybe you want to tune things down a step. Maybe you want to increase the game.

03:33

You're on hard mountain now, my friend. The guitars are so distorted, they're almost unrecognizable. The whole band hitting so hard, they're maxing out the meter with every downbeat. And it's here, looking out over the kingdom of music that I think we're going to stay.

03:53

Here at the top of hard mountain, we hear a sound so deep, it's practically prehistoric. Drop your tuning and crank your arms because it's time to talk about

Mastodon

04:12

I hope you're ready to rock!

04:19

All Gain, all the time as we dig into

Mastodon's

2004

diminished scale

demolition, Blood and Thunder.

04:43

Alright, I'm very excited to talk about this band. This is a band that I've liked since the first time that I heard them. A guitar player buddy of mine put this record on and while I hadn't listened to a lot of metal at the time - this was back in the sort of mid 2000s - I was immediately drawn to this. Because there's so much musical stuff going on, like with a lot of metal bands.

05:01

There's just a lot of creative musicality in

Mastodon's

music. A lot of that is

Brann Dailor

, their drummer. He's just this endlessly inventive player; he's a really jazz influenced dude. His drumming is just endlessly interesting but I've also really gotten into their compositional style and that's actually one of the things I really want to talk about on this episode.

05:20

So,

Mastodon;

bassist and vocalist

Troy Sanders

, lead guitarist and vocalist

Brent Hinds

, rhythm guitarist

Bill Kelliher

and drummer

Brann Dailor

, that makes up the core of the band.

Neil Fallon

Clutch

also joined them on this record. He's actually singing lead on this track and he sounds incredible; he brought so much power to this recording.

05:38

So,

Blood and Thunder

is the opening track of

Mastodon'

second studio album which is called

Leviathan

. That album is a concept album; it's retelling the story of

Herman Melville's

Moby Dick.

And I would say that

Moby Dick

, the tale of this epic clash between a whaling ship and a white whale, that's a pretty metal story to begin with and a pretty appropriate one to adapt into a metal album and that's definitely all over the lyrics to this song, if you go and read them. This is very much setting up the showdown between

Captain Ahab

and

Moby Dick

or the whale.

06:24

So, there's a lot going on in this song but I think that it manages to be very musically clear in a way that I appreciate. Like each idea and each section of the song is very clearly defined and it charts a really confident course from start to finish, through each of those sections. I really like what they're doing harmonically and I think it's a really melodic song in a way that's very interesting.

06:46

And that melody, like the way that the song has this broader melody that fits over the course of the entire song. It really fits with this arc of kind of rearing up from the depths and then diving back down to the bottom of the ocean. It's very appropriate for the thematic content of this album.

07:21

Yeah, like a lot of metal tunes, Blood and Thunder is not in standard guitar tuning. It's in a lower tuning, specifically D tuning, so it's down a whole step from where guitar is usually tuned. So, a standard guitar tuning goes E-A-D-G-B-E, those are the six strings over the course of those six strings, you cover two octaves from E to shining E.

07:46

And yes, this is something that I've talked about before. I think I maybe even made that joke before on my episode about

Queens Of The Stone Age,

in year two, about their song, No One Knows; that's in C tuning. So that's actually even lower than

Blood and Thunder

, which is in D.

07:59

So, Blood and Thunder is just everything is tuned down a step. D tuning is actually pretty easy to play. It looks and plays just like E tuning. So, if you already know how to play a lot of things in standard tuning, you can just play It's just that everything is down a whole step; so, we go D to G to C to F to A, and then to D.

08:18

Now, if you're going to really play in D tuning, you want to get your guitar actually set up to play in that tuning because what you're doing is, you know, you're loosening the strings so that they ring a step lower.

08:28

I've done that on my guitar here and if your guitar has already been set up which means, you know, the height of the strings has been set by a professional or by you if you know what you're doing, and the whole guitar is sort of primed to play in standard tuning. If you drop everything by a whole step, the strings get kind of weird, they start vibrating, they hit up against the frets a little bit more.

08:46

So, you kind of want to get a guitar set up to be played in a different tuning. And that's why a lot of metal bands will have multiple guitars, will have the C guitar and the D guitar and you know, other guitars that are in alternate tunings rather than re-tuning one guitar throughout a set.

08:60

So, my guitar is just, it's tuned, you know it's set up for standard tuning but I've dropped it down to be in D tuning and it just kind of gives it this heavier, thicker sound. Like, here's the opening riff of the song just in standard tuning. So, this is being played in E.

09:15

And the same riff drop down to D.

09:23

Just kind of thicker sounding, it's obviously lower and it just kind of sounds like a bigger instrument. So, a big part of this song sound is just that lower tuning. The fact that everyone is down a little bit lower, it gives it just this deep and heavy sound that a lot of metal has, especially when they're playing in tunings like C and D.

09:42

Let's look at that opening riff a little bit. I really like the intro to this song. It all kind of comes down to what

Brann Dailor

is playing because his drumming implies that this intro isn't an odd time signature when it's actually not, it's just in 4/4. They just kind of flipped the time on the second half of the riff and make you think that; oh, maybe they just need to borrow three or something, what's going on?

10:17

So, like I said, this is actually just in 4/4 and you can count it in 4/4. Just don't get thrown by the way that the rift shifts halfway through when they go up a half step. It's just two bars of 4/4. If you can get that into your head, you'll have no problem hearing this.

10:37

So it goes; 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4, 1-2-3-4.

10:54

You know, I mentioned

Brann Dailor's

drumming and something that he does that kind of makes this whole thing feel a little bit more on edge. Like, it's kind of tilting forward on its tiptoes is that he's hitting the snare drum on the downbeat on one, instead of on the backbeat, which really changes the way that it feels.

11:09

So, I've done a little recreation here; and bear in mind, I'm a jazz saxophonist and I do play guitar and I enjoy playing metal riffs, but I'm far from a metal guitarist. So, I did my best here to kind of recreate the vibe, but I think it'll get across the point I'm trying to make.

11:28

So, you can hear that in the drums —

11:36

Obviously, he's playing a lot more than that, but that's kind of the heart of his groove, is he's playing the snare drum on the downbeat — with the steady down beats in the snare. It would sound very different if I did a little bit more of a standard drum groove with the backbeat happening in the snare.

12:07

With that backbeat in there, it just sounds a little bit more standard and I would say a little bit less interesting. I think the downbeat is really kind of the thing that sets this intro off and puts you off balance from the very beginning. So, I want you to listen for that and to highlight it, I'm going to start with my recreation with that bbackbeat with the snare on the two and four. And then, it's going to fade into the actual recording where

Dailor

is playing the snare on the one and the three and just pay attention to the difference between the two.

Speaker 2

12:41

All right now, here comes the flip.

Kirk Hamilton

12:53

Here, where that snare drum is just — on those down beats.

13:03

Alright, let's get into that riff.

13:20

Alright, so this riff is really the heart of the song in a lot of different ways. A few crucial things happen here for starters; the drums go into a backbeat finally, so we switch up and we're getting some snare on two and four, which just makes things kind of lock into this back feeling, like it kind of just rocks a little bit harder. It's not pushing forward, it's sort of laying back into the groove. It's kind of more of a halftime feel. So instead of that — we're just doing this —

13:49

There's a lot of nice double bass drum stuff going on here too.

Brann Dailor

is master of the double bass drum, like most metal drummers are, and a double bass drum for anyone who doesn't know very common in hard rock and metal and basically it means that, you're usually it's just one bass drum. You don't actually have two bass drums though.

14:05

There are some huge drum sets that actually have two bass drums. I'm sure you've seen pictures of them. But usually, you just have the one bass drum, but it has two batters. So, your right foot is usually hitting the bass drum but then, your high hat foot, your left foot, also has a second pedal next to it with a sort of a long, you know, metal rod that reaches over to a second batter on the kick drum, so you can do double bass drum hits.

14:29

And once you get really going on it, you can go super fast and that's how

Dailor

is getting those super fast hits on the kick drum. You can't actually rabbit your one foot, just your right foot and get pretty fast bass drum hits, but this sounds like a double bass drum pedal to me.

14:55

So, I talked about the way that this song kind of rises up from the depths and then later plunges back down. The plunge back down happens on the bridge but this riff is really the thing that feels to me like a giant

Leviathan

rearing up out of the depths of the ocean.

15:09

It's a very dark and a very distinctive sound and the reason for that is that they are using the

diminished scale

, they're are using a

diminished seventh chord

, in order to build this entire riff. It's all built out of this one sound and that sound is the

diminished

sound.

15:24

So, now it's time to talk a little bit of theory and I kind of feel like, I don't know, maybe we need a jingle or something, for whenever we talk a little bit about theory, just a signal that that's what we're going to be doing.

15:35

Kind of hate it, we'll work on it, anyways.

15:43

So, we've talked about chords, we've talked about harmony, some in the past on this show, but I'm not going to assume that you've listened to any episodes of the show because hey, maybe you're just a

Mastodon

fan and you found this podcast and this is the first time you've ever listened to Strong Songs. So, let me just explain really quickly what I mean when I talk about

diminished

15:59

So, the most simple type of cord is a triad, this means there are three notes stacked on top of one another. We kind of start with a major triad which is one, three and five. The third is major and the fifth is a perfect fifth, above the root.

16:13

Those are all the terms for the intervals, but basically, it just goes one

major third

and fifth. I'm doing this in the key of D because this song is in the key of D. Blood and Thunder, in the key of D, because like I said, the guitar has dropped down to D and that gives us that nice low D.

16:27

So we've got a D-major triad which goes D, F-sharp, A. Then, you can lower that F-sharp down to an F-natural, that becomes a minor third. And then you have a minor triad D, F and A. So, we lowered the third, now let's lower the fifth. If you lower the fifth and the third, you get what's called a

diminished triad

that goes D, F-natural, a flat.

16:50

You could also do a

major third

and then raise the fifth; that's an augmented triad. I'm just gonna leave that out because it kind of feels more logical to go from minor to

diminish

. So,

diminished

isn't even darker chord sound than minor which is a darker chord sound than major. We've got D-major, D-minor and

D-diminished

diminished

has just got that kind of dark, gothic sound. I've always thought of it as the sort of danger, person is tied up across the train tracks, imminent threat is coming. It kind of has a silent movie house feeling to it.

17:21

So, as I've mentioned in past episodes, you can turn any triad into a seventh chord which just means, you add one more note and instead of having one-three-five you go one-three-five-seven. And in the case of a

diminished

chord, a

diminished

seventh is actually the same as the major sixth, it's down a whole step from the major seventh. So, in the case of this D chord, just to move this kind of long, we're going to go; D, then F, the minor third, then a flat, the flat fifth and then B-natural, which is the

diminished

seventh. So, a

diminished seventh chord

, a

D-diminished

seventh chord

, sounds like this —

17:55

Now, maybe this is already starting to sound a little bit familiar to you, let's go instead of going one-three-five-seven, let's go every other note. So, we're gonna go one-five-three-seven and let's just keep going in that pattern.

18:15

Now you hear it, right?

18:25

Right, so this riff, the primary riff on

Mastodon's

Blood and Thunder is built out of a

diminished seventh chord

. And the thing about

diminished

chords - and about the

diminished scale

too - but we're just talking about the cord here, is that it's a symmetrical chord structure.

18:39

Now, that sounds kind of technical, I promise there's a reason for explaining this and I'll explain what that means. But basically, not everything in harmony is symmetrical, right? Like a major triad, it goes D to F-sharp, that's a

major third

and then it goes F-sharp to A, that's a minor third.

18:53

So, it's a minor third on top of a

major third

. So, there's two different intervals that make up that triad, in this case however, in the case of a

diminished

chord, D to F, that's a minor third and F to A-flat, that's also a minor third.

19:06

And actually, if you spit it out to a

diminished seventh chord

, A-flat to B also a minor third and then B up to D, to the route to start on the next active, that's also a minor third.

19:16

So it's an entire chord built out of minor thirds and that means that it's symmetrical, you can just stack it on top of itself forever and you're always playing the same chord. What that also means, incidentally, is that a

D-diminished

seventh chord

, that's also an

F-diminished

seventh chord

, it's also in a flat

diminished seventh chord

and it's also a

B-diminished

seventh chords

19:35

So, actually, whenever you're learning

diminished

stuff like in music school, you only have to learn three of everything, which is kind of nice. It makes things a little bit easier when you're learning

diminished

19:43

So that symmetricality, it is actually key to the way that

diminished

sounds, it has a very distinct sound, I would say. And it's because, I think, it's all built out of the same intervals, so it starts to just feel a little bit disorienting, like you're just in a big wash of the same color and it's starting in different places each time, but it's all the same color. So you're kind of still in the same place and it makes for this kind of murky feeling that I really like about

diminished

and I think that

Mastodon

has really leaned into with this riff.

20:14

So, this song has been really fun to learn on guitar. They're just playing power chords for almost everything in this song. A power cord is just a root in the fifth; very, very familiar shape for any guitar players out there. And, you kind of just slide up that

diminished seventh chords

straight up the sixth string, all the way up the neck.

20:29

And it has this feeling like you could just keep going and just keep climbing higher and higher and higher because the

diminished

chord just kind of does that. It has this feeling like no matter where you are, you could always just keep going. And, it would always sound the same no matter how much higher or how much lower you went. So, here's my little recreation of that riff section. The bases, just doubling the guitar.

20:47

So, it's really just kind of a simple thing for the base but just try to listen to that contour, the way that that

diminished seventh chord

works. If you split up the

arpeggio

, the way that they do, and also feel for how that group sits back. Now that the drums have gone to that backbeat in the snare drum, the whole thing just kind of has a different pulse to it, than that more forward moving into a riff.

21:30

This song rocks super hard. This one has just been really fun. It's fun to play with so much

gain

on guitar, which is just not something that I do that much of. And,

gain

, for people who don't know, it's basically the measurement of how much a signal's voltage is being increased by given amplifier. So, how much voltage the signal is gaining as it passes through the amp.

21:50

So, when you plug a microphone into a microphone pre-amp, that pre-amp adds

gain

to the microphone signal and that's what makes the mic sound a lot louder when it comes out of the pre-amp versus how loud it was when it was just coming straight off of the microphone; which isn't actually very loud, microphones don't actually produce a super strong signal.

22:08

That's actually true of guitars as well. You've heard an electric guitar when it's not plugged in or you probably have and it's not very loud. And that's because the actual signal that an electric guitar produces is not super strong. But, there are a whole bunch of different points in the guitar signal chain where you can add

gain

from a distortion or

overdrive

pedal into the guitar pre-amp, into the guitar power-amp. And, all of that like managing that and getting your sound using all of those different steps is called

’gain

staging’.

22:34

When you turn up the

Gain

on your

overdrive

pedal, it gives you more volume going into the amplifier. When you turn up the

Gain

on a pre-amp on an amplifier, that gives you more volume going into the power-amp and so on. So, really high game playing, which I've got two distortion pedals are in

overdrive

and

distortion pedal

turned on here and the

Gain

on my amp has turned up and I'm no hard rock expert, I'm just sort of trying to get somewhere in the vicinity of the sound.

22:58

But I have a ton of

Gain

between those three game boosts and as a result, my signal is super distorted and a cool thing actually happens when you play with really high

Gain

on your guitar; is actually your guitar becomes very sensitive to everything that you do, because just touching it causes sound to come out of it.

23:16

And, anyone who's ever plugged into a super loud amp and just turn the volume all the way up, knows that actually, if you're really good at guitar and you have very, you know, dexterous fingers, you can get a lot of really varied and interesting sounds out of all the overtones that start ringing out from high

gain

23:31

So,

gain

can feel like, maybe it's going to be this thudding heavy thing, but it can actually be a really beautiful thing that you can use in a lot of different ways. They're using it, you know, in a pretty heavy way on this

Mastodon

track. But I'm always surprised, whenever I'm playing around with my

gain

super crank, just that all of the sounds and interesting textures I can get out of the instrument.

24:07

They're getting some of those here actually, during this riff, there's some nice stuff. One in particular is, they do some nice

pick sliding

, that's when you scrape your pick along the string; usually along the sixth string and you kind of hit it fast at first and then slow it down and it gives you that trademark kind of electric guitar skids sound. And; they do quite a few of those on this section; that sounds really sweet.

24:34

I'm always kind of amazed by rock guitarist who can just do a perfect pick slide while playing. For me, it's always something I've got to overdub later. But, when I've watched rock guitar players play, they just like do a perfect pick slide while in the middle of playing a riff, which, I at least, find very impressive. It's harder than you might think.

24:54

So, from here they go through the verse and the chorus again. At least, I'm thinking of it as the verse and the chorus, basically riff one and rift two. And, I don't have a bunch to say about

Neil Fallon's

vocals even though he sounds great; partly, because I do not actually understand how to perform metal vocals without destroying your voice.

25:33

I barely understand how to record a podcast without destroying my voice. It's a skill I just do not have. But, it is pretty amazing what

Neil Fallon

and the rest of the guys in a

Mastodon

are able to do on this song and in all of their songs. And really, anybody who does this kind of really hard music, there's so much technique and so much maintenance involved.

25:51

It's something I have a ton of respect for, especially if you're gonna go on touring with a band like this. I mean, I have no idea how people do that, but they do it and my hat is off to them.

26:15

So, I do want to pause briefly on the next section that's coming up, the next new section, which is the sort of instrumental breakdown where we get some nice guitar minis and a little bit of

phrygian

in action, which is cool.

Phrygian mode

makes a bit of a cameo and this otherwise,

diminished-dominated

song.

26:30

This is also where

Brann Dailor

finally gets to really embrace his inner Prague drummer and where the band goes into eleven, they go into an odd time signature. So, this is really where things kind of get very technical for a minute. It's really cool. Check it out.

27:02

So let's just start with the harmony. This is actually in

D-phrygian

; I would have guessed this would be indeed

diminished

given this song's love affair with

diminished

sound. But now, this is actually

phrygian

being the third mode of the B-flat major scale.

27:15

We've talked about modes before. If you want to know more about modes, I recommend going and listening to the episode about

Miles Davis'

So What

from

Kind of Blue

. Lots of explanation of modes there.

27:24

I'm not going to get super into it, but I do think it's worth taking a moment to talk about a little bit more. Yeah, I don't know. Anyways, okay,

D-phrygian

basically, it's like you take a B-flat major scale, but then you play the same notes starting on D, and you get

phrygian

in scale.

27:50

The defining sound of foraging is that flat to the very first note is just a half step from here, going from D to E-flat, and in this riff, it's definitely a big part of that sound and that is actually a sound that it shares with

diminished

but it's just not quite a

diminished Scale

28:02

So two guitar players are playing this; this is both

Bill Kelliher

and

Brent Hinds

, or at least, I'm assuming it's the two of them and they've overdubbed themselves a bunch. But, two lead guitars in harmony, they're playing the same riff exactly a fifth apart and the whole thing moves in parallel fifths, which gives it this uncanny sound; that's actually a sound that

Mastodon

really likes.

28:21

They do this kind of parallel motion a lot and it has a cool effect here, I think. So, if you start on the

D-phrygian

and scale the bottom part just sounds like this —

28:32

And, if you play the same thing up a fifth, so you're basically playing

A-phrygian

up a fifth, put them on top of one another and you get this —

28:40

So that's the first figure and then it just repeats down a whole step. So, it's

C-phrygian

with

G-phrygian

up on top and that sounds like this —

28:49

It's kind of a fun exercise to play that if you're not very good piano player like me, it's just good to practice things in parallel like that with your left and your right hand.

28:57

Anyway, listen back to the riff and just try to hear both of those guitar parts. They're playing the exact same thing of fifth apart. So, it's easy for them to kind of blend together but see if you can pick them apart and hear them as separate instruments.

29:26

You can pick out those harmonized guitars and hear that

phrygian

scale, and there might actually already be a third guitar part in there. There's definitely a lot of overdubbing going on. I'm mainly hearing two parts and harmony but this guitar arrangement, kind of expands and I would get the sense that they are doing some overdubbing.

29:41

So, there might be another octave on that, a

Phrygian

riff already, and there's definitely a third guitar part that's going to join once the full group comes in. But, that's the basics of what's going on with this riff. Let's talk a little bit about the counting because the counting seems pretty wild at first; it feels like they're displacing hits and - what's going on? - but it's not actually that complicated, once you get your head around it.

30:01

It's just a bar of five and then a bar of six, or at least I find that, that's the easiest way to think about it. So, whenever you describe something as being an eleven, it sounds kind of wild - whoa, this is an eleven! When you describe it as being in five plus six, sounds a little bit more approachable.

30:15

So, this is just in five plus six and they make it really easy for you to count. This is actually, a great song for getting familiar with counting more progressive, metal time signatures because the riff, it plays once and five and sort of 5/8 and then it plays again, but then it just adds a beat at the very end.

30:31

So, you can just count at the exact same way you counted it when it was in five, and then just add one more beat to make it in six. So, let me demonstrate what I'm talking about; here is the first half of the phrase, this is just in five. I'm gonna do it quite a bit slower so you can count it. It sounds like this; and 1-2-3-4-5, got it? I'm gonna do it again; same thing, this is five beats, here we go; and 1-2-3-4-5.

30:58

So, there is that triple it in there —

31:02

That can kind of throw you off. Once you get your head around that, you'll start to feel the pulse. Here's the thing, the second half of the phrase has six beats in it, right? Because five plus six is eleven, but that half of the phrase is the exact same as the first half.

31:15

It just adds one repetition of the last two notes at the very end. So you can almost sing the same thing twice, you just have to remember to add two notes at the end, every other time. So, remember the part that's in five, goes like this; 1-2-3-4-5? And then, the second half, which is in six, goes like this; 1-2-3-4-5-6. Put them together and you get this; 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5-6.

31:47

Of course, it's faster than that. So, try it a little faster and 1-2-3-4-5, 1-2-3-4-5-6. Get that in your head and you'll have no trouble counting along with this whole section. Let's try it together. Here we go —

32:18

Alright, you got it.

32:25

So, as you may have noticed, when the groove comes in, they simplify the rhythm. They removed that triplet - but it just becomes —

32:33

So, it actually gets easier to count in that way. They do complex the arrangement though, by adding a third guitar part. There's a lower part, over on the left, playing that

D-phrygian

riff and then the

phrygian

riff is actually now being played by two guitars in octaves, more over on the right. So, there are three of them.

32:48

Now listen, as that groove comes in, pay attention to just how the riff is. A little bit rhythmically simplified but also more complex because there are now three guitars playing, you hear him? The highest one is in the middle.

33:10

Now, throughout this section,

Brann Dailor

is playing this almost like latin thing. He's really mixing it up on the drums, this has this super hot bounce, zero gravity kind of thing, kind of feels like it's up on its tippy toes which couldn't be in greater contrast to the next section.

33:46

Oh my god, this bridge. So, this is just the churn of the ocean. This is a battle with the

Leviathan

in a storm as the waves crash across the deck. This is the depth and the power of this song. And this is also when this sort of direction of the song heads back downward.

34:03

So if you picture that initial ascending,

diminished

riff as sort of the creature coming up from the depths, this is when the creature hits the surface; kind of breaks the surface. There's this violent clash and then it goes back down. This whole riff is just descending, going back down the

diminished Scale

all the way back, almost down to that low deed.

34:29

When you say the wide world God, This just, this music is not subtle and I love that about it. These lyrics give me a break: "Split your lungs with blood and thunder when you see the white whale. Break your backs and crack your oars, men, if you wish to prevail." Hell, yeah, right!

34:55

Say the white world, right rules. Okay, so this bridge, this is just really the climax of the song. Again, we're just playing power chords on the guitar; the bass and the guitar doubling.

35:18

And they're basically saying the same thing and we just kind of go down, this sort of stepwise grand staircase, down a

diminished Scale

and not just a

diminished

chord. And I guess, that means it's time to talk about a little bit more —

35:31

Nope, nope, I hate it! We're not doing it, that bit is dead anyways. I am going to explain the

diminished Scale

really quickly.

35:39

So, every kind of chord has a corresponding kind of scale. A major chord goes with a major scale, a minor chord, guess what; it goes with the minor scale. So, a

diminished

chord goes with a

diminished Scale

diminished

scales are pretty cool though.

35:52

They're a little bit different than major and minor scales because just like the

diminished

chord, they're symmetrical. They go in this pattern, this repeating pattern of a half step than a whole step and half steps and whole steps onward,

ad infinitum

36:03

And that means, again, that a

diminished Scale

has this kind of disorienting quality to it. So, on the bridge to Blood and Thunder, they go down the sea half whole

diminished Scale

, starting on C, then down A-minor third today, then down a minor third to F-sharp.

36:17

So, they're playing the

diminished Scale

but they're emphasizing the

diminished chord

and you can really hear that symmetrical quality. Like it's moving between these symmetrical steps down the scales that gets lower and lower and it gives it that really great, inexorable descending feeling.

36:43

Meanwhile,

Brann Dailor

on the drums makes this definitely the most grandiose and large sounding part of the song. But, he does that in a way that is actually something that drummers do a lot, but that, you might not think would be the approach you would take, he does that by playing a lot less.

36:58

This is his most sparse drum part in the entire song. He's basically playing half-time. It's this really laid back thing, just a pretty steady thing in the kick drum. Steady cymbal hits and then a backbeat every so often with occasional little fills, but it's really pretty minimal.

37:14

So, here's my recreation of the bridge with the drums at it and just pay attention for that. Listen to how few notes the drums are actually playing, as well as that descending, inexorable

diminished

riff as it moves down by minor thirds, down and down and down, almost to the bottom of the guitar.

37:51

This bridge continues; you can really feel the crew frantically bailing out, water

Neil Fallon

everybody around, that's all I got to try.

38:15

From there, they just go back into that ascending riff and they basically play the same ingredients that we've already been over. They just play it on the way out, with a bit more energy. I've watched some videos of these guys playing this live; of course, I haven't seen them and there is no way, to the video of a live performance of the song can capture the energy that they get live.

38:32

But man, you can kind of imagine what it would be like. This song must just crush live, the same way that this band probably does and this whole section, I mean, the intensity of this song from here to the end is just out of control.

38:53

This closing guitar riff is a great example of how much mileage you can get out of just the sounds that an over driven guitar makes. They're basically just playing a D, like a D

power chord

and then they add an F-sharp on top a

major third

, which gives it a sort of this like baroque, almost operatic sound.

39:09

I mean, it's basically a

picardy third

; this song has had no interest in

major thirds,

really. For the most part, there's a couple of F-sharps, I suppose, but it's really this minor

diminished

sound until here at the end. And suddenly, they're jumping in on an F-sharp, which really just underlines the kind of dramatic finality of this ending riff.

39:26

Also, they're just doing those sugars, which just, if you kind of mute like palm-mute with a

super-gain

heavy guitar, you can just get these extremely great sounds out of just hitting the sixth string with no real note coming out. A very, very common metal sound and they're hitting it super hard here.

39:49

It's a killer way to end a tune and a killer way to kick off an album. The white whale has risen up from the depths, crashed across the surface of the ocean and return to slumber in the deep, Absolutely as we stand atop the mountain, the ship and the creature fade from sight, the wind is blowing and the song comes to an end and that'll do it for my analysis of Mastodon's, Blood and Thunder; the killer opening track off of what's probably my favourite album by one of my favourite metal bands. I hope you enjoyed it.

40:29

And hey, thanks for joining me here for Strong Songs, year four. You probably know by now that I make this show all by myself. I am an entirely independent, one-man operation. So, thanks so much to everybody who supports me making it on Patreon. And, if you want to support me making the show, you will also get access to a bonus podcast feed with some pretty fun bonuses.

40:47

I'm gonna be doing a lot of those here in year four. So, go to patreon. com/strongsongs to find out more. There's also a link for direct donations. There's a merch store link, social media links; there's all kinds of stuff down in the show notes. Go check out the show notes. There's always good times down there.

41:02

I am looking forward to answering a lot of your listener mail in year four. So, if you've got a musical question, you think I might be able to answer, Send it to listeners@strongsongspodcast. com.

41:10

Long time listeners will know that I like to feature outro soloist at the end of each episode. I've got some pretty cool ones lined up for year four, but first, I wanted to kick off year four by playing an outro solo of my own; not on the saxophone but on the electric guitar.

41:23

I've actually been practicing a lot of electric guitar for the last year. I've got some licks together and I figured, it was time to take him out for a spin. So, I hope you dig it. And, I'll see you in two weeks for more Strong Songs.

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