Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Mastodon
Label: Relapse Records
Released: 2003
Length: 50:26
Rating: 4.8/5
When I try to define my love for what I hear, I can’t (and don’t want to) fully separate it from the factor of what pleases me and what’s simply a matter of taste. But whatever I’ve listened to, I’ve only ever trusted the feeling in my heart, my soul and the deepest gut of my being. When I felt that sense of total fusion with the music, I just knew it would reach and surpass one-hit-wonder status. Something like that hit me back in 2003, which already feels like ages ago. Enchanted and overwhelmed by what I was hearing, all I could do was collapse to the floor, out of pure joy that the music world, after what was then my last great discovery and after years without any honest surprise or sparks of genius, was seeing tectonic shifts again, and that there was still hope for my insatiable soul. The band that swept me away and wiped out every doubt was Mastodon, and about this record I’m now going to share some of the most heartfelt lines I’ve got on my love for music.
My fascination with the flames of creativity could finally feast on the kindred essence of the purest, rawest fire, which Remission unveils from the first track on. Many consider this record the one Mastodon album that supposedly isn’t conceptual, but behind it lies precisely a fascination with this wonderful, elusive element, arguably the freest of them all (besides aether, of course). In a 2004 interview, drummer Brann Dailor revealed that this album was a therapeutic excursion into the world of music, a way to sing a song for his dead sister and ease his aching soul, even just a little. As he told Lollipop magazine: “My sister killed herself when I turned 15 (she was a year younger then), and I couldn’t talk about it or sing about it anywhere. All that pain I carried around like a burden… All that immense pain was just sitting there in my soul. In Today Is The Day I poured a lot of anger into the music, and once the anger was sung out, there was no more need for that primal feeling. When I started playing in Mastodon and moved to Atlanta, it was time for some serious soul healing and recovery. Mastodon have a lot to do with that, and a big part of it is hidden in the very title of the record, Remission. Remission means release and healing, and Mastodon undoubtedly helped me with that: that’s when I was able to let go of a huge amount of what had happened in my life.” And the album Remission squeezes those black demons out loudly and mercilessly, even from unsuspecting listeners!
After the very first listen it’s crystal clear that this Atlanta quartet doesn’t retreat into metal purism. Their machinery hides plenty of prog and jazz elements, and the elementals of rage weave naturally and juicily together with an ethereal sense of pain and even a melancholy lingering in slowed-down spheres. This long-extinct mammal has grown two more pairs of legs than the original since the turn of the millennium, and its multi-tonal lungs fill up and gutturally empty out through the vocal cords of bassist Troy Sanders and the gifted guitarist and oddball Brent Hinds. The organism is completed by the slightly less showy but always superb guitarist Bill Kelliher and the talented and undoubtedly masterful tamer of drum beasts, Brann Dailor. If the extinct relative of the elephant that shares their name was ominous and massive, its sonic portrayal is a few tons heavier still, and devastatingly technical.
The blend of feelings that evoke Isis, Converge, Meshuggah and Dillinger Escape Plan is a reactive mixture of musical genres with a strong metal core, with, as I said, virtuosity front and center and song structures that are technically polished to the last detail. The first thing that jabs you in the ears is the outstanding production, which continues the string of phenomenal records by the aforementioned Isis, the lesser-known Botch and a few other post-apocalyptic riders of pure pleasure, also because the mixing desk was touched by the fingers of the undisputed wizard of this kind of production, Matt Bayles. But outstanding production isn’t what makes up the whole body of outstanding musicianship; it just gives it room to bloom fully. Stimulated by the ability to articulate, four sound shamans step forward, who had until then been forged in bands like Today Is The Day and Lethargy. These veterans of destruction and pure musicality take you on a wild ride, and somewhere along the way you’ll hit a plateau of ecstasy and give yourself over to dancing, if there’s even a little life left in you.
The opening blow is the ten-ton riff of Crusher Destoyer, in which a stunning wall of guitars, Sanders’ guttural vocals and a crushing, unstoppable drum rhythm weave their brutal dance. Sanders sings: “listen / here lies the warning for matador / blackout / blood running the dirt floor / won’t bleed by accident”, and you can’t stop listening, because what follows is the top-notch dance of a million fire ants in March Of Fire Ants.
Mathematical trigonometry and rhythmic mathematics get reduced to a prehistoric sum of one perfect mass, in which several segmented layers are fused into a steel fist of titanium that hits without mercy. And once you’ve been softened up by the blows of the sonic waves, the psychedelic death metal moment of Where Strides The Behemoth follows. Southern temperament pours the purest sludge charge into veins smeared with swamp mud, and under the layers of gigantic grit hides plenty of jazzy finesse and progressive genius. It surfaces in its purest form in the dreamily tangled weave of Ol’e Nessie. “Sanction lived in / taught by masters / flight of giving / be mine always / here for duration / miss my sweet love / times of sailing / keep me grounded / make us sure of future sanctions,” words that sound like fractals of half-articulated thoughts, giving off the deeper tone of a soulful haiku of pain and mourning for an honest love that died and closed itself in the cycle of life and death. The raw continuation of the hardcore-minded Burning Man carries on in the black dance of tattered fatality in the sensitive, ominous-sounding Trainwreck. The liturgy of a Sabbath-style farewell plays out with remarkable, surgical finesse, and inch by inch you give in to a feeling of smallness and fragility, waiting for the final redemption and the revelation of the boundless fields of musical ascension. Trilobite, the closing act of the fascinating Mother Puncher and, cherry on top, a soulful rendition of Thin Lizzy’s Emerald wrap up this epic in a state of total fusion into one hefty whole that is everything and nothing.
For those who are a bit more demanding, the deluxe version has extra material for empirically verifying Mastodon’s greatness, as the guys show and prove that they can recreate what they recorded confidently and flawlessly on concert stages too, with no repeats and no mistakes. The bonus DVD brings an outstanding, intimate trip to their hometown set at The Masquerade, a hall in their native Atlanta haven, where a vignette of live images unfolds before your eyes, the ones that a happy crowd of several hundred got in that Georgia city in December 2002. After that the words died away and the cerebral waters drained out in the ejaculate of a total, ecstatic mental orgasm. Mastodon confirmed their primacy of excellence and proved they’re a big, no, a huge band, on whom, among other things, the entire future existence and survival of megalomaniac structures depends. The crossing of genres filled the firmament and the skull split open to dimensions bigger than the expanses of hell, so that you could very soon enjoy the sequel and grapple with the seeming opposite of fire on the record Leviathan, but that’s the second pair of boots you’ll be able to pull on soon. If you dare, of course, to keep going with the wild dance of the miraculous crossbreeding of high-octane musical derivatives and to pour the purest napalm of extraordinary musical boundlessness into your ears, one that condenses into minutes-long primal vignettes of the brilliant, and to step a little deeper into the world of seemingly extinct giants of the past …
Line-up
Troy Sanders − bass, vocals
Brent Hinds − guitar, vocals
Bill Kelliher – guitar
Brann Dailor − drums
Production
Matt Bayles & Mastodon
Track list
1. Crusher Destroyer
2. March Of The Fire Ants
3. Where Strides The Behemoth
4. Workhorse
5. Ol’e Nessie
6. Burning Man
7. Trainwreck
8. Trampled Under Hoof
9. Trilobite
10. Mother Puncher
11. Elephant Man
12. Emerald (bonus track)
Deluxe Edition DVD
1. Olé Nessie (Live)
2. March of the Fire Ants (Live)
3. Hail to Fire (Live)
4. Where Strides the Behemoth (Live)
5. Battle at Sea (Live)
6. Mother Puncher (Live)
7. Burning Man (Live)
8. Workhorse (Live)
9. Crusher Destroyer (Live)
