When the first Down album, NOLA (Elektra), came out in 1995, the idea of stoner metal as a semi-mainstream phenomenon was inconceivable. You might have been able to catch a Kyuss or Cathedral video on one of the last episodes of MTV’s Headbangers’ Ball, but the Queens of the Stone Age media blitz was still years away. So it was a bit of a surprise when Pantera singer Philip Anselmo, the most popular metal frontman of his generation, got together with some buddies from Corrosion of Conformity and Crowbar to pay tribute to Black Sabbath — and even more of a shock when the resulting disc found favor with Pantera kiddies and underground doom freaks alike.
Like any supergroup whose members have full-time bands of their own, Down appeared to be a temporary proposition. But with Pantera and COC both coming off particularly good efforts, Anselmo and friends have resurfaced with a new album, II (Elektra), and a headlining tour that hits the Palladium in Worcester this Friday. Clocking in at over an hour and touching on everything from old-school Southern boogie ("Beautifully Depressed") to stoned hillbilly soul ("Where I’m Going") to stomping paranoia ("The Man That Follows Hell"), II is psychedelic roots metal at its most ambitious.
The new disc also marks the debut of Down as a serious touring entity. According to Down/COC guitarist Pepper Keenan, they played "13 or 14 shows" to support the first album; this time, they’re headlining the second stage at OzzFest all summer in addition to their own headlining tour. "We don’t have an opening band, so we’re playing for two hours," says Keenan of the current outing. "We’re actually at the point now where we’ve got enough songs to play that long. That was the weird thing about the first Down tour. We just did what was able to cut through that amount of time, you know?"
Along with their status as card-carrying members of the metal elite, the members of Down share another bond: they all grew up in Louisiana, as the title NOLA (short for New Orleans, Louisiana) attests. When it came time to record II, the band grabbed producer Warren Riker and threw together a home studio in the swamps outside the city. They wrote and recorded the whole thing in a month; the degree of debauchery involved is already legendary. "We kept recording off-the-cuff things and having them stick," says Keenan. "The further we got, the more it got organized even though we weren’t trying to. It became a bigger thing than we all thought it would be."
Any project these guys are involved with is bound to have a death-rock vibe, but Down’s brand of home-town pride is particularly ominous: one of the most memorable titles on the new disc is "New Orleans Is a Dying Whore." "That came from something we had all discussed," Keenan explains. "It was a newspaper article that just kind of blossomed. New Orleans is a very old city that’s been neglected by its leaders and will continue to be. To me, it’s a very old woman who’s seen her better days."
Down perform this Friday, May 3, at the Palladium in Worcester. Call (508) 797-9696.
