Mastodon. Pretty happy with themselves.
Mastodon just don’t stop. They played close to a hundred shows across numerous countries last year in support of Crack the Skye. They’re just about to kick off the UK leg of the tour, and beyond that they’re booked for dates in every month until June. They must be knackered.
But, in this maelstrom of live shows, they’ve somehow managed to find the time to write the soundtrack to Jonah Hex, the upcoming DC/Warner Bros film adaptation of the comic book of the same name, about an ex confederate soldier and bounty hunter with a gnarly tomahawk-burned face.
Thomas Jane wanted the title role pretty badly, but luckily he was pipped to it by Josh Brolin of No Country For Old Men fame. That was a good film. Punisher was not. But Megan Fox is also in it, so considering her usual role as plot-hole-masking eye candy, I’m dubious as to how good it’ll be. Obviously Christopher Nolan and to a lesser degree Frank Miller and Zack Snyder have set a high bar as far as the genre goes, but people need to learn that not everything should be adapted just so the generally illiterate public, with their miniscule attention spans (waah, books r teh long, crycry), can digest the often brilliant stories to be found in literature. So if it’s shit, it probably isn’t Mastodon’s fault.
</rant>
The story is that listening to Blood Mountain inspired director Jimmy Hayward to finish the script. One fanboy-phonecall later and guitarist Brent Hinds was on the next plane* to New Orleans to visit the set. Apparently Hinds is now even in the film as the first of a reported one hundred and seventy-two souls to be slaughtered onscreen. Noice.
As for the music itself, no excerpts yet, but Troy Sanders says:
“Some of it was heavy, some of it was very moody,” Sanders said. “A lot of it was spacey, Melvins B-sides, Pink Floyd-like, surreal outer space, like Neil Young’s Dead Man. Swirling, nausea music.”
I’ve got to say, whatever the film is like, it’s basically a new Mastodon album fifteen months after the last one was released, so I’m pretty excited.
Jonah Hex hits cinemas on June 18th, and the internet sometime before or after that.
- CG
* artistic license
