:: Mastodon - Blood Mountain

Mastodon

After a long and successful tenure with Relapse Records, and after being hailed as the next big thing within the metal scene, Atlanta (Georgia) based progressive metal act Mastodon caught the attention of the major labels, and duly signed up with Warner Bros. Records. After a lengthy two year wait, Mastodon has finally delivered what is undoubtedly one of the most anticipated albums of the year in ‘Blood Mountain’, and needless to say, it lives up to the hype that preceded it’s long awaited release. Without so much as a warning, Dailor’s renown frantic drumming style introduces the blisteringly fast paced opening track ‘The Wolf Is Loose’, but it’s Sanders who really exemplifies the continually expanding sound of Mastodon, with his vocals now being sung almost entirely clean like, without taking away from the technically/progressive sound that has essentially been Mastodon’s from day one.

The highly charged rocker ‘Crystal Skull’ could have easily been lifted from ‘Leviathan’, while the epic ‘Sleeping Giant’ sees the band broaden their progressive influences with flourishes of acoustic guitars, spoken word passages, carefully constructed vocal melodies and plenty of atmospheric guitar work. The single ‘Capillarian Crest’ and ‘Circle Of Cysquatch’ are swirling masses of mixed styles that defy any one particular genre description, and highlight the dual vocal approach and the twin guitarist’s abilities, while the powerful ‘Colony Of Birchmen’ (featuring a guest appearance from Queens Of The Stone Age’s Joshua Homme) and the Clutch like ‘This Mortal Soil’ are as melodic as the Mastodon sound gets, but hardly accessible in the traditional sense.
The riff heavy ‘Hunters Of The Sky’ and the intense groove of ‘Hand Of Stone’ are fairly staple Mastodon numbers, leaving the scattered ‘Siberian Divide’ (Featuring The Mars Volta’s Cedric Bixler-Zavala on guest vocals) and the drunken sea shanty/psychedelic ‘Pendulous Skin’ (featuring The Mars Volta’s keyboardist Isaiah ‘Ikey’ Owens) to finish things up in truly confusing Mastodon fashion.

As part of the limited edition version, ‘Blood Mountain’ is also packaged with a DVD featuring a forty-four minute ‘making of’ documentary (informative, and worth a look), a photo gallery (containing seventy-six pictures) and the promotional video clip for ‘Capillarian Crest’. ‘Blood Mountain’ is easily Mastodon’s most well thought out, mature and expansive sounding (courtesy of Matt Bayles’ production) releases to date, and one that again clearly marks out Mastodon as a unique and individual band, and one with few to compare to.