MDIA 1020 I Hate This Album Review

I Hate This Album – The Hunter by Mastodon

            Mastodon is easily my favorite progressive metal outfit by far, which is why their most recent release, 2011’s The Hunter, crushes me on a deeply personal level. This is not to say the album is so heavy that it reverberates through my being with resonance and meaning. Instead it does the opposite. While there are a handful of pleasantly heavy, riff-centric tracks–The Hunter, Spectrelight, Stargasm–the album enthusiastically falls flat for the most part. It seems Mastodon has opted for a lighter aesthetic almost, and while I’m hesitant to label this album as commercial or easily consumable (it isn’t), it is, by Mastodon’s standards, significantly less defiant and loud. As a metal fan, that latter descriptor is the essential component for any successful, engaging metal record. The riffs should be bold, crunchy, alarming. The drums should be pounding and resonant, and while I find The Hunter technically up to par, it doesn’t rise above that mark. Though there are a few tracks that truly satiate my appetite for headbanging, they are greatly outnumbered by songs you could encounter getting rotation on your local hard rock radio station. The album’s first single Curl of the Burl exemplifies this better than any other cut off the album. The vocals are wholly clean, and worse yet, they’re silly. The opening line “I killed a man ‘cause he killed my goat” sets the tone for a song that quickly overstays its welcome, as it does nothing to delineate from the verse/chorus/verse/chorus structure Mastodon has generally abstained from in the past. This structure can be found throughout the album on cuts such as Dry Bone Valley, Bedazzled Fingernails and Blasteroid, and it is depressing each time. While there is plenty of riffage, and an ample amount of screaming too, The Hunter is without question Mastodon’s weakest release record to date, both aesthetically and authentically.

MDIA 1020 Rolling Stone Album Review

Rolling Stone Album Review – Blood Mountain by Mastodon

            With Blood Mountain, progressive sludge metal quartet Mastodon has ascended to the highest ranks of heavy while simultaneously bridging the gap between the authentic and the accessible. Usually when someone who approaches music seriously hears the term ‘accessible’ they tend to assume an artist or band has chosen to create within a more commercially accepting format. Never has this assumption been less true than with Blood Mountain, a rich, dizzying, and altogether exhausting record that only grows richer the more it is listened to. Melodies abound and coalesce with some of the most intricate fretwork to date coming from Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher as drummer Brann Dailor continues to astound with unrelenting percussive bravado.

            It is Dailor who opens the album with a furious introduction on “The Wolf Is Loose” that sets the pace for every sonic component within the album. Brent Hinds and bassist Troy Sanders switch off on singing duties, with Brent handling most of the screaming and Troy doing a good deal of crooning and chorus work with lyrics pertaining to the fantastical, specifically the titular Blood Mountain, on top of which rests the crystal skull, a magical object capable of removing man’s reptilian brain in an effort to achieve the next step in human evolution. Fans of Mastodon shouldn’t be surprised to see this narrative quality on full display with Blood Mountain, given 2004’s Leviathan was essentially a sonic reinterpretation of Herman Melville’s magnum opus Moby Dick (1851), going so far as to name one track “I Am Ahab”.

            This time around, Mastodon uses no source text to create a densely layered epic. More interested with theme instead of folklore, Blood Mountain sounds just as menacing as the creatures it depicts. “Sleeping Giant” takes its time with a bellowing opening riff, soon giving way to more ethereal tones while the album’s math-iest cut “Capillarian Crest” gives the listener literally no time to breathe as Hinds and Kelliher play in sync with each other at dizzying speeds. The album’s only instrumental “Bladecatcher” features even more relentless pick work while cultivating a hallucinogenic aesthetic similar to eating strange berries deep in a tangled forest. “Colony of Birchmen” continues with this hallucinatory motif, starting with its first line, shouted by Hinds: “This forest is growing faster than I can tell.” Queens of The Stone Age singer and guitarist Josh Homme provides backing vocals for the track, lending it even more psychedelic cred.

            The record slightly falters with “Hand of Stone” and that’s only because it can’t match the intricacy present on the rest of the album, offering a heavy but rather standard cut that doesn’t really deviate from a verse/chorus/verse structure. “This Mortal Soil” and “Siberian Divide” (featuring guest vocalist Cedric Bixler-Zavala, formerly of The Mars Volta) serve as a climactic two-parter detailing our protagonist succumbing to nature, unable to endure any more frostbite or psychedelia. Blood Mountain’s final cut “Pendulous Skin” finds Mastodon at its most soulful and melancholy. The song’s title is yet another reference to the Elephant Man, a staple in Mastodon’s catalogue fans of the band have come to expect. With Blood Mountain, Mastodon has firmly established itself as the rulers of sludge and the trailblazers of modern metal. We should all take note.

Mastodon

Blood Mountain 9/10

Reprise Records, 2006