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Album Rating: 3.0
A LOT of the choruses run really thin, Brann's vocals are cleaner and easier on the ears than the others but I feel like there's a blandness to him too. Song structures are generally quite predictable in a way I think worked much better on The Hunter, and this has some lowwwww lyrical moments. The hey ho lets fucking go at the end of Aunt Lisa is really bleh
I think there is a really great album in here, its just too commercially structured in a way that hampers the strengths of the band. Feels like the riffs here that would have once been the centerpiece of songs are now just used for the verses (Chimes at Midnight is especially paced like shit). Asleep in the Deep is pretty sick tho
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
Blowz yeah.
| | | Album Rating: 3.5
"Feels like the riffs here that would have once been the centerpiece of songs are now just used for the verses (Chimes at Midnight is especially paced like shit)."
I like how you worded this. The ideas aren't really allowed to breathe, except notably on Tread Lightly, Asleep, and Diamond. Let it ride, my dudes. Bring back Bayles.
| | | Album Rating: 4.0
Agreed re:brann fowl, though I have no clue why so many people are so down on hey ho lets fucking go. Always been an album highlight for me
| | | Album Rating: 3.5
I cringe a little but also it's a cameo by a punk girl group called The Coathangers so how mad can you get
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Damn I didn't know that, that's cool af. I did always like the music beneath the hey ho bit, maybe Aunt Lisa deserves a revisit
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high road was a good choice as the lead single imo
| | | Album Rating: 3.5
probs time I give it a whirl too
high MV was pretty wholesome, kinda forgettable song tho
| | | Album Rating: 4.0
Yeah high road is kinda eh, feels like a clumsier triangulation of radio hooks and prog/psych/metal stuff than, say, Steambreather
| | | Album Rating: 3.5
High Road is a song I truly disdain. Always skip it if I do re-visit this album
| | | Album Rating: 4.5
high road kinda sucks but this album goes in. ember city m///
| | | Album Rating: 3.5
Enjoying this tonight after several years away. 3.5 feels right.
| | | Album Rating: 4.0
Yeah it's got some jams! Love that opener, love Halloween, love Aunt Lisa
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Went through this at work and largely feel the same. Really feels like that writing super verse/chorus/verse stuff lends to most of the really cool moments exploding mostly in the bridges; for example, The Motherload. Everything up until the solo feels so uncanny valley of Mastodon that I get sucked almost out immediately, but wow that solo is so damn good I end up not minding at all. Of course this does mean a lot here also feels really lopsided, i.e. Tread Lightly, Chimes, Ember City, and Feast Your Eyes.
Songs that stood out on relisten were The Motherload, OMRtS (severely underrated, this was always my favorite off this and might still be), Aunt Lisa (its delightfully weird in a way most of this avoids and I definitely overhated the ending), and Halloween (oh wait this is my favorite I forgot this one). Asleep and Witch House obviously still rule, but neither really stands so far above the rest of the other material here as to enter the upper echelons of Mastodon song. I suppose that's my other problem too, I really resonated with Sevengill's comment the other day about the Biblical scope of the early Mastodon albums, and this album has probably the lowest scope of any 'don album. First and foremost it's a collection of straightforward rock songs, which in a way is almost undone by the kind of musicians these fellas are. It's fucking jarring to hear Brent's hillbilly riffery over a radio rock song, or Brann's drumming. Not that these elements aren't incredible and interesting, but that the incredible nature of them exists within such stringent commercial boundaries here as to almost become a gauche attempt to reimagine a sound fundamentally opposed to imagination. Maybe that's why the two radio rockers that are actually straightforward radio rockers, OMRtS and Halloween, are my favorites here.
As is, I'm comfy with the 2.5, but I will be jamming Halloween a lot.
| | | Album Rating: 3.5
Cheers man, glad to hear your thoughts. Re: biblical:
I was so utterly enchanted by Mastodon after Blood Mountain that I still have residual nostalgia about every album through Emperor. You know, "I was there when." New 'don was a national holiday for me -- stop the presses, clear my schedule, all I'm doing this week is Crack the Skye. On those albums, I felt like I ended them in a different place then when I clicked 'play'. I was Frodo Baggins, there and back again after an epic journey across the ocean chasing an unkillable Whale, or jumping through history fighting Ghost Rasputin for my beloved's soul. That four-album elemental cycle (fire, water, earth, aether) was breathtaking at the time.
And when it ended, Mastodon become...mortal. The albums fragmented, like they could've been made by someone other than the angry, patient primordial gods who cooked up "Megalodon" and "Sleeping Giant". After four of these albums, made by people who have people problems like friends dying of cancer and this being their full-time job, it's time to accept that Mastodon the supernova is now Mastodon the nebula. They make palatable, above-average metal for people who don't have the time to dissect 14-minute album climaxes, and their next record will be equally as good on shuffle as it will front-to-back. And that's okay.
I can slap Blood Mountain on the record player and go back to one of those otherworldly journeys any time I want. I'm still a little sad that's all we're going to get, though.
| | | Album Rating: 3.5
...yeah.
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
Thanks for such a thoughtful response, that's an incredibly healthy and coherent way to look at the band's evolution that I'm gonna try and apply. I suppose its like blaming Icarus for not staying close to the sun forever.
Funny enough, our perspectives differ in one significant way, this was the first 'don release I was ever aware of. My local rock station played The Motherload a lot and it was my first interaction with the band and little 14 year old me was wayyyy too green even for that song lol. Then for my 16th birthday my aunt got me Blackwater Park and Leviathan and I was off. My first proper Mastodon release cycle was for Emperor and I think I got a little bit of that conceptual blast with that album, even if it wasn't quite up to the quality of their early releases. I was introduced to the band at almost the perfect point to have the right amount of awesome material available and on the horizon to treat The Hunter and OMRtS as moreso supplementary material, like Call of the Mastodon, instead of actual releases, which might be clouding my opinions too hmmmm fuck it I'll 3 this
| | | Album Rating: 3.0
a perfectly cromulent album agreed
| | | Album Rating: 2.0
I dont like it
| | | Album Rating: 2.5
pulled ember city off this and never went back.
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