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
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