I wrote about Brann Dailor’s latest project, Arcadea, for Spectrum Culture.
For his new project, Arcadea, Mastodon’s vocalist and drummer Brann Dailor joins forces with two keyboardists and vocalists, Core Atoms of psychedelic weirdos Zruda and Raheem Amlani of black metal experimentalists Withered. The trio’s self-titled debut is a concept album that the band has described as envisioning “a future five billion years from now, where the impending collision of galaxies creates a new order of planets…where cold, distant moons pledge alliance to new suns and expanding gas giants implode into black holes” and where “Arcadea reign supreme as the last surviving space wizards since the final extinction.”
It is within this context that you begin to understand what Arcadea is: namely, a frontrunner for oddest album of 2017 and the silliest thing Dailor has ever been a part of—and keep in mind that Mastodon once made a record about a child’s soul traveling into the body of Grigori Rasputin via astral projection who tries and fails to overthrow a Russian czar…or something.
If the explanation of the record’s content isn’t ridiculous enough, simply refer to the lyrics. When the vocalists aren’t busy singing in the first person as a group of electrons (“We spin freely/ We breed orbit/ Velocity/ We crash to ignite, we are electric”), they’re trying to sell absurdist word salad (“Crystals that form on the outside of life/ Lifeless the seas that have sent them in waves/ Perfect destruction, we’re floating away/ Swim through the static, the ocean alive”) and cosmic beat poetry (“Push past the pulsar phantoms with future kind/ Erase, replace, deface, create the space”).
The assumption, then, is that it’s better to focus on the music and melodies, right? Well, mostly. The darting, nimble melody of “Gas Giant” and the ethereal vocals of Susanne Gibboney’s guest spot on “Neptune Moons” suggest as much. Hell, the vocoder-heavy vocal melody of “Through the Eye of Pisces” sounds like the first draft of a Daft Punk song, and “Motion of Planets” has an actual groove. The majority of the album, however, imagines oddball scenarios like electro-funk having an epileptic seizure or a pinball machine doing an impression of an Atari 2600. Keyboards and synthesizers pulse, twinkle, fizz, bubble, jab and stutter, yet to accurately describe this record is to traverse dangerously close to Dr. Seuss territory with onomatopoeic non-words like “skwonk,” “squink” and “twonk.”
Either way, Dailor’s drumming throughout demonstrates his unwavering faith in the proceedings. His effort to break up the wall of bong-ready keyboards and synths via his insistent jazz-style playing is both Herculean and Sisyphean in equal measure. Even on subdued compositions “Neptune Moons” and “Through the Eye of Pisces,” where he largely acts as time-keeper, Dailor can’t help but let a few fills seep out as if to imply the songs weren’t interesting enough as is.
Still, the record is not a total loss. Sure, there’s undeniable, right-brain creativity here, like when the keyboards in the left and right channels have a ray-gun fight (“The Pull of Invisible Strings”) or when the band attempts to soundtrack electrons colliding (“Army of Electrons”). Even the jam session that closes the record is loosey-goosey fun. But, it’s that esoteric nature which ultimately becomes Arcadea’s downfall. Weirdness is good in art, maybe even essential. When weirdness goes unchecked, though, it tends to suck away good ideas into oblivion—kinda like a black hole.