For the few who’ve been tapped for the gig, to open for Tool is to understand that Tool’s fans aren’t there to see anyone other than Tool — they can expect indifference at best, and hostility at worst.
Joe Lester, bass player for Los Angeles prog-metal combo Intronaut, knew this even before his own band got the call from friend, fan and Tool bassist Justin Chancellor in 2012.
“Tool crowds are notorious, just like Slayer crowds,” Lester, speaking by phone, tells the Scene with a laugh. “They do not give a fuck who you are if you’re opening. Isis, Mastodon — they got booed. Tomahawk — they got booed. So we knew that, totally expected it, were ready for it, were cool with it.”
But when Maynard James Keenan & Co. took Lester, guitarist-vocalists Sacha Dunable and David Timnick, and drummer Danny Walker out for that two-week arena tour, a funny thing happened.
The Tool faithful loved them.
“No one booed us at all,” Lester recalls. “I’d attribute it to us having the right combination of odd-time-signature, cyclical rhythms — a big Tool thing — and vocals with real harmony and melody. Between those things, that was enough.”
For Intronaut, it’s one of many rewards the foursome has reaped for sticking together and playing the long game. They’ve been a band since 2004 and known each other much longer, since their early days as long-haired, metal-loving miscreants growing up in West L.A. — “little rockers, grungy motherfuckers,” in Lester’s words — playing death metal at lunchtime for their dumbfounded alternative high school classmates as The Dregs, a prior incarnation of the band lost to time.
Their 12 years since christening the Intronaut moniker have been jam-packed. In that time, they’ve toured as far as India, when not headlining package tours like the one coming to The End Thursday, July 28, with Entheos (featuring Nashville-bred bass virtuoso Evan Brewer) and Moon Tooth (from Long Island) and opening for, besides Tool, the likes of Helmet, Mastodon and the mighty Meshuggah.
With five full-length albums and more than 2,000 shows in the books, Intronaut has effectively transcended the famously insular heavy-music scene that birthed them, building their name on shape-shifting compositions that, while certainly complex, leave room to jam, sounding highly textured, never labored, and — this is key — impossible to copy.
What distinguishes Intronaut’s latest, last year’s The Direction of Last Things, from past efforts is how the group recorded it, tracking almost everything live to the floor for the first time in their career. The catalyst for this was a combination of wanting to spring for the services of a legendary but expensive mixing engineer — Devin Townsend from the theatrical Canadian metal act Strapping Young Lad — and a recent experience working as the backing band for Cloudkicker, the nom de plume of reclusive Ohioan Ben Sharp, in 2014.
“Ben writes albums only, never plays live,” explains Lester. “They’re instrumental, and just beautiful, like a cross between the rhythmic power of Meshuggah, and Explosions in the Sky. The post-rock chord changes.”
Intronaut reached out to Sharp as fans, offering to back him up on tour should he ever decide to make time; eventually he obliged, and during the monthlong run that ensued, the morning before a show in Austin, they cut a live record together in a matter of hours.
“The success of that venture informed how we did our next album,” Lester says. “We went old-school, let go of the overproduction aspect that technology allows for. We come from being live performers who play every night, kill it, so we knew … even though it was crazy to record the thing in less than half the normal time, [just] to be able to afford [Townsend], if anyone could, we could.”
And how. When you listen to a band with a narrower stylistic focus, you know pretty quickly whether or not it’s your thing. Last Things, on the other hand, shows a willingness to meet anyone in the middle if they’re down to hear the band out for the length of one song — on average, six or seven minutes. The LP’s seven tracks, while still plenty gnarly, offer a host of entry points for new listeners, whether they’re fans of drop-D stoner metal, mantra-like psych, emotive ’90s alt-rock, even highbrow jazz fusion.
This love of bridging genres will always be Intronaut’s calling card, says Lester.
“I think what’s true for a lot of metal musicians — and this is different from other angry, loud styles of music — is this built-in eclecticism, a thirst for truly stimulating musical content. We’ve definitely experienced disinterest from the fan bases of some bands we’ve been on shows with — grind, death metal bands — because they only came for one thing: brutality. But we also sometimes enthrall people who’ve never heard of us. We’re heavy enough to totally bro down with seriously heavy bands, but can also cross over with [people] on the more rock ’n’ roll side of things.”
Even Tool fans.
Email music@nashvillescene.com
