Growing Bored For a Living: The complete Mastadon, part 1

Tuesday, February 21, 2017

The complete Mastadon, part 1

Gotta come clean.....this is a band with which I do not have a great deal of familiarity.....I have thier whole discog (if you are a fan you'll be pleased with the amount I assure you) because a friend of mine loves them and I made the discog for him......likely, have listened to it twice......don't know why, could be the video-game tie-in thing (I HATE video games), or whatever, but I am bingeing the discs as we speak, and this is some very versatile, imaginative, and really impressive heavy metal.....it's sludgy sometimes, or crystal clear at others......a really varied attack, sludge, stoner, prog, and just good old heavy metal trash wind up here and there, and the albums are well though-out, lyrically sophisticated conceptual affairs for the most part. I have missed out on a good band, hope they don't mind "sharing" because I'm up for putting a lot of their stuff up for ya this week, hope the effort is worthwhile.

Mastadon are from Atlanta and consist of singer/drummer Brann Dailor, singer/guitarist Brent Hinds, singer/guitarist Bill Kelliher, and singer/bassist/keyboardist Troy Sanders.......on occasion they utilize guest vocalists, which is always a touch I find intersting.......lets start with album #1, 2002's "Remission".......I turned this one on and at once I knew this was a band I probably should have been down with.......somewhat annoying vocals at times, (I know some of ya LOVE vocal style, I don't)....but we have some awesome instrumentation (espcially like to point out the drumming).....very solid metal debut, "Where Strides the Beheamoth", a typically, wonderfully pretentious metal atitle, is my fave here, a speedy rant for sure, but there are plenty of goodies here, as long as this vocal style doesn't grate on you much.

I like "Leviathan" better, the vocals are better, and musically, still hard rocking and interesting......from what I read, lyrically inspired by Melville's "Moby Dick", would take more investigation to grasp that totally, I guess, but a good album, "Blood and Thunder", "Island" and "Aqua Dementia" stand out here, but hell, this is a solid as fuck, damn near 5-star effort.......they have a new fan!

"Blood Mountain" came along in 2006, really no new ground is broken, but in metal?.......well, they know their format and know it/utilize it well......more speedy metallic head slammers, "The Wolf Is Loose", "Circle of Cysquatch", and "Hunters of the Sky" stand out, but there is good stuff all over the place here for head banging junkies.

In 2009 they released "Crack the Skye".....it features cleaner vocals (we cana rgue over whether that is an improvement, my vote is yes), and is perhaps a bit more ambitious, daring.......what?, "Oblivion" sounds almost grungy (Cool song), the epic "The Czar" is about 11 minutes of the kind of stuff we expect from most of our rivitheds, but, seriously, these boys do it well.......4/4 now for good solid albums released.

Well, what brought this up to begin with is Fabio sent a few singles, I assume from their upcoming release......I'm sure when it comes out, someone will slip it this way, but I am enjoying the fuck out of these albums tonight. The next album was 2011's "The Hunter", a good one as well, "Curl of the Burl" rocks to the bones, as does "All the Heavy Lifting", all in all another good album.

Finally for tonight, 2014's "Once More Round the Sun", more of that same unique blend of
style/sound.....metal is rarely called "unique" and for good reason, but these have a distinctive, and as I said before, quite intellectual sound dand feel to them........verdict: I REALLY like them!

I'm sure if you are a fan you have all these, but to me it's like a new
discovery.....And, for you dedicated fans, this will probably go three parts as I have a bunch of live stuff, EP's, all that good stuff. I REALLY do like these albums, and impressed very much with how the band adapted to changes in musical trends without compromise........good, hard/heavy and INELLIGENT rock is sometimes hard to come by, here are five slabs of it here.

REMISSION

Crusher Destroyer