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.