The New York Times-20080126-Easing Taut Prog-Metal Into a Majestic Crunch- -Review-

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Easing Taut Prog-Metal Into a Majestic Crunch; [Review]

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Neurosis started out in the late '80s as a hard-core punk band, making rickety songs in speedy two-beat rhythms. Its music was a slanted plywood hutch. Now it makes monument music: slow and graceful, determined, balanced, imperious.

The band's show on Thursday night took place in the Brooklyn Masonic Temple, a 99-year-old columned cube in Fort Greene, which is just now presenting music on a regular basis. (The show repeated Friday night.) Neurosis has its Masonic tendencies. There's an obsession with craft, and with mysticism -- or at least the puniness of man's will against larger forces. There's the fact, too, that the band has preserved its own fraternity through the years, cohering more tightly.

Somehow Neurosis has gotten better, going further into its details, finding more passageways of texture and color and dynamics underneath its domineering surfaces. It's easier to grasp this when the band plays live, stunningly loud and remarkably concentrated. Its songs are not short -- 8 to 15 minutes, usually -- and its musicians, seemingly encased in their own force fields, are not ingratiating. At one point Scott Kelly, one of the band's two singer-guitarists, hit a microphone with his forehead as he jackknifed forward during a riff. As if swatting a fly, he kicked the heavy microphone stand into the audience, without bothering to look where it landed. It was a relief to see that he was aware of something outside himself.

The band played against a backdrop of handsome black-and-white films and photographs: snowy mountains, hawks in flight, solar eclipses, lilies blooming in fast motion like the opening mouths of monsters. (The artist Josh Graham made these montages; he has been working with the band since 2000.) And the music was giant but reserved, sometimes even cool: it had a kind of tamped-down power.

What made it that way? Two guitars playing boiled-down riffs in unison for long stretches. (Distill! went Steve Von Till's refrain in one song.) And the watery role of the band's keyboardist, Noah Landis, who made enormous but edgeless, vaguely cathedral-organ drones, sometimes with digital samples. These sounds infiltrated the music but remained elusive; they snaked through it, rippling and then disappearing. Sometimes they weren't melodic at all. During moments of noise that your brain might first have processed as guitar feedback, you suddenly realized that it was entirely coordinated, and that most of it came from Mr. Landis's end of the stage.

And then it was the tempos, always slightly slower than one might expect in this context. In Water Is Not Enough, a new song, Jason Roeder found his weirdly wakeful crawl, hitting the loosened hi-hat cymbals and letting them rattle together, and otherwise going curiously easy on his cymbals for a song intimating Armageddon. Mr. Kelly howled about events that were not going to happen anytime soon, but did so as if they had already begun: The hand is gnawed/The end is nigh/The warriors remain and they bring us to the sky/We'll burn in the sun/And we'll fall to the moon.

Mastodon, whose metal genealogy is easier to discern, doesn't need to play opening slots at 1,000-seat halls; it's more popular than that. But its members are full Neurosis supplicants, so such a thing happened. Hearing a metal band operate on Mastodon's level -- all its breakdowns and reconstitutions, suite form and odd time signatures -- was nice; hearing it with some houselights on and at lower volume, in full opening-band mode, was even sweeter. It reminded you that even the highly accomplished still have heroes.

[Illustration]PHOTO: Steve Von Till, left, and Scott Kelly played guitar for Neurosis. (PHOTOGRAPH BY RAHAV SEGEV FOR THE NEW YORK TIMES)(pg. B11)