Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Artist: Mastodon
Label: Warner Bros. Records
Release: 2006
Rating: 4.5/5
Aaaaaaaa!!!! This is insane. Looks like bands in the US are finally kicking ass again the way they should! Metal is gaining totally new dimensions these days thanks to groups like The Mars Volta, Opeth or Mastodon. With their third album “Blood Mountain”, the quartet from Atlanta takes their body of work full of extreme musical ingredients to the next level. Mastodon feel like a new beginning, a new branch on the tree. Like Metallica in 1986 when they burst onto the scene. One of a kind for its time! Mastodon mix the “sludge” of New Orleans (Crowbar, Eyehatedgod) and the melodic side of classic metal with the intrinsic nature of death metal, and then dress it all up in the first-rate garb of unpredictability worn by the giants of seventies progressive rock (Rush, King Crimson). Lovers of good music snapped up their 2002 debut “Remission” right away. Now here’s the third album, and we can hope we’re on the brink of an explosion, a big new wave of extreme music, projected through an endlessly alluring, all-encompassing prism of free-spirited experimentation.
The album came out on Warner Bros, which is a big deal. When the major labels start pushing and backing the real deal, it means the times are clearing up for proper rock music too. The same thing happened 20 years ago, when Warner Bros put out Metallica’s “Master Of Puppets” and Slayer’s “Reign In Blood”. The band may be fired up by the brutality and aggression of death metal and thrashy riffing, but the most enticing bits are exactly the ones that build on that foundation with unpredictability and subtlety, through experimentation in the most twisted progressive way!
What draws people into metal is of course the fantasy-tinged lyrics and album themes dealing with the beyond and especially the occult. Mysticism is something Mastodon know very well. They picked the ideal concept to go with their own musical layers upon layers. The story revolves around a hero who has to climb to the top of a living mountain to get his hands on a crystal skull and reach enlightenment. Along the way the hero faces all kinds of fears and monsters! There are sleeping giants, a one-eyed creature called Cysquatch, half-tree half-human beings, the ice god pictured on the album cover, and all the other most thrilling creatures of human imagination,… Metaphorically, the album can stand for personal purification, or for the band’s own quest for success, climbing to the top of the mountain (Warner Bros), with the summit representing commercial and artistic success, the latter in the form of planting a new branch of musical genre. So all these monsters stand for the everyday personal fears that need to be overcome, and once you reach a state of accepting everything that surrounds you (the crystal skull), you’re ready for enlightenment. Enough daydreaming! Back to the harsh world of Western society’s logical empiricism. “Blood Mountain” follows the earth element, which is its main motif and guiding thread. If you remember, the debut “Remission” followed the element of fire, while the second album “Leviathan” (2004), inspired by the adventures of the white whale Moby Dick, followed water.
Musically, the four of them have never reached such unity and coherence in playing their own material. And yet Mastodon take care that their technically superb mastery of their musical tools and weapons never tips the scales in its own favor, to the detriment of the band’s uniqueness, juiciness, the fatal attraction of its demonic charm, its musical depth and its highly atmospheric subtlety, all of which come from the quartet’s rock-solid united focus. Bassist Troy Sanders and guitarist Brent Hinds have formed an outstanding vocal duet that sits perfectly balanced between extreme screaming and enigmatic melody. This music can’t be pinned down! The guitar work brings in elements of extreme metal! Thrash riffing drive, doom/stoner riffs (Sleeping Giants!), all of it neatly wrapped in hardcore dissonance, and the typical rhythmic tempos you hear in “death” metal bands rule here too (Hand Of Stone). Brann Dailor’s drumming gives the band the dimension that lets the quartet play pretty much whatever it feels like. So through experimentation, the seeds of jazz sneak into Mastodon’s expression too. The drumming is flawlessly captivating and the listener just gapes in shock as the rolls fly in from every side, with unpredictable turns, tempo changes and drops into counter-rhythms! There’s boundless room to work with, and Mastodon are true shapeshifters, drifting adaptably like an amoeba through every dimension they decide to travel into. In the moments when the guys launch into a full-on instrumental, it sounds like everyone is playing a completely different melody, but in the end it all folds together into one perfectly dynamic whole. A prime example is the schizoid, mentally filed-down instrumental Bladecatcher, as if a modern King Crimson were playing Rush’s instrumental YYZ in the most evil staging imaginable
The album opens with Wolf Is Loose and Crystal Skull, both loaded with a primitive eruption of thrash riffing and hardcore dissonance and a chatter of extreme-leaning screamed vocals, so the album leaps out of the gate with incinerating dynamics from the very first moment. Next comes Capilarian Forest, which sounds like Mastodon playing between the notes, or like listening to a track by spinning it backwards – mostly King Crimson, but turned ominously into a brutal sphere. The fourth track is Circle of The Cysquatch! It travels through the darkness of doom, with an atmospherically elevated middle section standing out, topped off with a sampled robotic voice of the one-eyed monster. The atmosphere grows with a sense of ever-present dread and hits its peak in Colony Of Birchmen, which you can literally picture live, with a stellar chorus and disjunct guitars that really don’t fit together, but that’s exactly what shocks you, conjuring up the idea that harmony can exist inside disharmony. Watch out for the crazy choir (Colony Of Birchmen) in the chorus, which sounds like a gospel choir of slaves dropped into the damnation of a metal riff. The dread doesn’t let up on the album’s atmosphere in what follows either, thanks to the grandiose opening riff of Hunters Of The Sky. Next up is the venomous madness of This Mortal Soil, in which the guys swap between 6 tempo changes in a mere 5 minutes or so. The album closes with Pendulous Skin, a kind of final release, a smoldering ray of light at the end of the tunnel, a breeze of southern rock in an otherwise obscure mood, confirming the refinement and the superb subtle touch that Mastodon possess.
With “Blood Mountain”, Mastodon delivered their third album in a row and an achievement that bands of their age and with such a short track record can only dream about. This is an album that knows no limits and is fragmented into at least as many pieces as there are facets in the compound eye of an insect! Warner Bros allowed the band absolute dominance over its own artistic direction, so: freedom! “Blood Mountain” is without a doubt one of the creative peaks of this year, a dangerously dilettantish album that shifts the musical magnetic fields toward new dimensions and will be hard to match! An album that’s not for every pair of ears and one that rewards the listener for a long, long time. Let’s wait and see what time brings and what “Blood Mountain” means on the musical map of the future. Death are buried, but if they were alive, they might well have evolved straight in the direction Mastodon are taking today. A direction without direction, or the direction of all directions! An album after which you can barely wait for the next Mastodon album to drop.
Lineup
Troy Sanders – vocals, bass guitar
Brent Hinds – vocals, guitar
Bill Kelliher – guitar, backing vocals
Brann Dailor – drums
GUEST MUSICIANS:
Scott Kelly (Neurosis) – vocals
Josh Homme (Queens of the Stone Age) – vocals
Cedric Bixler-Zavala (The Mars Volta) – vocals
Isaiah “Ikey” Owens (The Mars Volta) – keyboards
Production
Matt Bayles
Tracklist
1. The Wolf Is Loose
2. Crystal Skull
3. Sleeping Giant
4. Capillarian Crest
5. Circle Of Cysquatch
6. Bladecatcher
7. Colony Of Birchmen
8. Hunters Of The Sky
9. Hand Of Stone
10. This Mortal Soil
11. Siberian Divide
12. Pendulous Skin
Album length: 74.12
