Mastodon - Emperor of Sand

Angry Metal Guy

From the moment I heard the pummeling “Crusher Destroyer” from their landmark debut Remission some 15 years ago, I knew Mastodon were something special. My infatuation with Remission began a love affair with the band that bordered on fanboy-ism from one excellent album to the next, each a stirring and adventurous behemoth of sludge metal force and progressive smarts. However, my relationship with Mastodon started to get rocky when they followed their sprawling prog masterwork Crack the Skye with 2011’s The Hunter. It wasn’t that The Hunter was an inherently bad album, it simply found Mastodon playing it too safe, simplifying their sound into streamlined sludge rock with songs that were easily remembered in the short term, but ultimately disposable. 2014’s Once More ‘Round the Sun was an improvement, adding a touch more color and proggy weirdness, but failed to produce a lasting impact. With creativity smoldering, Mastodon return to stoke the fire on their seventh LP, Emperor of Sand.

Mastodon’s triple pronged vocal attack, excellent drumming and penchant for writing booming sludge rock hooks remains, albeit in the band’s more palatable recent context. However, in the lead-up to the album’s release there were throwback signs hinting of a band hoping to recapture their former glory. From the artwork, re-emergence of their original logo, even the album title and concept smacked of a return to Mastodon’s deeper roots and prime songwriting. The basic concept at hand follows the path of a wandering individual handed a death sentence by a desert ruler and left trudging through a wasteland. Basically, it’s a metaphor for the band members personal connections with cancer sufferers and the heartbreak, loss and roller-coaster of emotions these experiences entailed, lending a strong emotional resonance that is heard and felt throughout. Unfortunately, Emperor of Sand isn’t a return to the band’s glory days, but it’s a step in the right direction.

“Sultan’s Curse” is the strongest opener the band has penned in a long time, taking the best parts of The Hunter and mixing it with the muscular riffs and hepped-up energy of Blood Mountain, sporting emotive and stirring vocal melodies during its latter half. Musically, the excellent “Steambreather” evokes Alice In Chains underrated self-titled album, bolstered by Brann Dailor’s catchy vocal melodies, stellar drumming and overall impressive rock dynamics. Like or hate their individual styles, the improvement in Mastodon’s vocal arsenal has been significant, and jointly the trio are responsible for numerous rousing moments, trade-offs and memorable choruses. For example, “Word to the Wise” gets the balance right, as Troy Sanders’ burly verses contrast effectively against Dailor’s catchy melodic chorus, further bolstered by some scorching guitar work. Elsewhere, the groovy “Clandestiny” injects a quirky bed of spacey synths in an oddly welcoming mid-song psych detour, while the tender closing epic “Jaguar God” plays up the band’s more adventurous nature and love of prog. Nearly all the songs hit the mark to some degree, although “Show Yourself” is a semi-irritating tune that gets stuck in your head, but is brought down by clunky lyrics, irritating verses and a generic Queens of the Stone Age groove. Thankfully it’s the only notable sore spot in an otherwise catchy and solid collection of tunes.

One element of the Mastodon sound that has avoided the band’s overall simplification is Dailor’s exceptional drumming. The dude brings an abundance of awesome fills and tight, technical rhythms to the equation, playing with multi-limb finesse and tons of energy, enlivening the more straightforward and stock standard elements of their familiar sound. While Brent Hinds and right hand man Bill Kelliher dish up their most inspired and technical playing since Crack the Skye, retaining their signature style and bringing a stronger array of serpentine leads, burly riffs and scorching solos to compliment their idiosyncratic prog tendencies. Recorded by Brendan O’Brien, the production is solid enough and par for the course for a modern Mastodon album, sounding bright, punchy and suitably detailed, though lagging in dynamics.

Listeners expecting a return to the classic old days of Leviathan or Crack the Skye won’t find much solace in what Emperor of Sand has to offer. But those who have kept the faith during Mastodon’s patchy recent era will be rewarded by a tight batch of trademark modern Mastodon tunes, featuring skyscraper hooks, playful prog and a more focused and adventurous take on their refined sludge rock. Take it with a grain of salt if you will, but Emperor of Sand is the best Mastodon release since Crack the Skye and a fun and addictive rock album in its own right.

Rating: 3.5/5.0
DR: 6 | Format Reviewed: 320 kbps mp3
Label: Reprise Records
Websites: mastodonrocks.com | facebook.com/Mastodon
Releases Worldwide: March 31st, 2017

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If you’re not familiar with the band, they’re like the MC Escher of modern metal, or perhaps the Salvador Dali, or HR Geiger. Their music is confusing. It runs backwards, sideways, loops on itself like a Möbius strip. They’re kind of weird. They’re unsettling. They’re intellectual in the sort of way that suggests they might have an obsessively large collection of dead moths and be interested in the plastination of corpses. They appear hulking, like cosmic vikings, with guitarist Brent Hinds bedecked in blue Celtic tattoos. You wouldn’t mess about with them, basically.

On Emperor of Sand, their seventh full length record – no mean feat in itself – we find a similarly spaced-out Mastodon, but also a band who are becoming more playful and melodic, whilst simultaneously dragging themselves deeper into their dark abyss of Lovecraftian influences. Crammed with allusions to ancient history, mythology and biblical references, they return renewed to a lyrical world they began to craft on their 2004 release Leviathan. A bit less self-aggrandising, a bit more interesting, much like the album itself.

An eye-watering guitar solo on ‘Roots Remain’ brings things into sharp focus on a first listen through. They have not lost their edge. If this was a blade it would be a surgeon’s scalpel. It’s the sort of song which peels you open and has a good rummage around inside. You won’t be the same after listening, and they might have dropped their keys in there when they stitched you back up.

Elsewhere ‘Ancient Kingdom’ has some surprising major key twists and turns which hint at something a bit less brooding from the quartet. Now heavily encamped in the 'clean vocals' bracket, the band are still moving towards, dare I say it, a more commercial strain of progressive metal, if indeed there is such a thing. Is it possible to write a mainstream technical metal concept album about cursed men wandering in deserts? The jury’s out on that one.

The intense instrumental experimentation and frantic fretwork is still abundant, but the po-faced professional musicianship is conspicuous by its absence, and Mastodon wear their new look well. In terms of where the record sits in their canon, it treads a fine and nuanced line between Mastodon-lite and the envelope-pushing experimentation that makes them genuinely exciting.

The key words here are restraint and cognisance. It’s clear that they’ve got a newfound respect for their own music – just as things take a step too far in the wrong direction, they herd songs back in masterfully. By the same degree, when they’re in danger of playing it safe they have absolutely no qualms about nose-diving a song structure off a cliff in a spiralling descent into madness.

‘Jaguar God’ feels like an attempt at writing their own version of Metallica’s mighty ‘One’, but there’s much less pomp and ceremony and a whole lost more legitimate sincerity. As a closer for the record, it’s about as close to a pop song as a band like Mastodon are likely to get. It may well divide fans, but it proves that they’re about as far from a one trick pony as it’s possible to be.

With so much discussion in the rock and metal world about where the future festival headliners might lie, it’s increasingly looking like Mastodon and their ilk are the natural heirs to a throne that’s been jealously presided over by the old guard. The band are more than capable of filling some very big shoes – the question is really just whether, and when, they’ll take the plunge towards finally breaking into the big leagues.

Emperor of Sand, it seems, is a confident and timely step in the right direction. A balanced and well measured offering that might not revolutionise the heavy music landscape just yet, but positions them very well indeed for future greatness.

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At least in certain respects, Mastodon’s Emperor of Sand might well be metal’s answer to Rush’s mainstream-conquering 1981 classic Moving Pictures. For its seventh studio outing, the Atlanta quartet reins-in its prodigious technical abilities without watering them down. As Metallica’s black album famously showed, this is no easy feat. Mastodon haven’t had an easy go of it either, but fans who thought 2014’s Once More ’Round the Sun veered uncomfortably close to radio-friendly should give Emperor of Sand a chance.

That’s not to say this new album isn’t stuffed to the gills with melodic singing—you can expect to hear a bunch of these songs on commercial radio this summer. Opener “Sultan’s Curse,” for one, is a trademark Mastodon gallop that again shows guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds doing his best impression of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. Second track “Show Yourself” starts out with a bouncy, almost danceable boogie-rock hook before reverting to one of Mastodon’s zig-zagging riffs. Be warned: If you see clean singing as a concession, you’re going to have issues with this album. And if you’re wary of returning Crack the Skye producer Brendan O’Brien—famous for helming ’90s blockbusters by Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots—you should know that, as usual, O’Brien smooths out some of the band’s angular edges. But unlike the last album, Emperor of Sand’s balance tips back to what Mastodon built a reputation on.

Over their first three proper full-lengths—2002’s Remission, 2004’s Leviathan, and 2006’s Blood Mountain—Mastodon flexed their chops almost like a sports team that had more to prove the more successful it got. By 2009’s Crack the Skye, a concept album that revisits Tsarist Russia via Stephen Hawking, Mastodon’s lyrics had grown as lofty as the music. At the same time, Crack the Skye contained hints that a more tempered approach was coming. The band’s three lead vocalists—Hinds, bassist Troy Sanders, and drummer Brann Dailor—began to exchange death metal howls for increasingly melodic singing. The transition to concise songs on 2011’s The Hunter might have come as a shock if you were a fan of the 13-minute rollercoaster suites that incorporated death, thrash, Southern, and traditional heavy metal. But the hooks had been lurking all along.

Nevertheless, if you’re partial to Mastodon’s longer, classical-influenced songs, you’re not going to see Emperor of Sand’s appeal—unless you zoom-out and take the album as one complete work. That’s not difficult to do now that Mastodon have finally mastered the art of writing 11 tracks that flow together as one. Like The Hunter and Once More ’Round the Sun, each of the songs on Emperor of Sand stands alone, musically speaking. But this time, the band took a page from Crack the Skye to spin an elaborate yarn about the passage of time, using sand as a metaphor for mortality but also as a window to set the story in the deserts of ancient Arabia. In true Mastodon fashion, the album’s protagonist attempts to communicate telepathically with African and Native American tribes in hopes that they’ll make it rain on his behalf.

The plot gets way, um, thicker than that, but suffice it to say the band leaves plenty of room to geek-out on the lyrics. More compellingly, Emperor of Sand marks the third Mastodon album directly inspired by a bandmember’s loss of a relative, in this case the untimely passing of guitarist Bill Kelliher’s mother. That Mastodon are capable of channeling personal tragedies into madcap sci-fi fantasy is impressive, but on Emperor of Sand they finally harness their musical ambitions as well.

Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice. Meanwhile, Dailor—never a drummer you could accuse of under-playing—doesn’t so much tone down his playing so much as shift between varying degrees of busy. It makes a tremendous difference, adding dynamics to what was once an endless flurry of fills and rolls.

During the bridge section of “Clandestiny,” an ascending Tony Banks-style synthesizer line stamps Dailor’s long-professed love of Genesis’ prog opus The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway onto Emperor of Sand’s sleeve. Unlike Genesis, however, Mastodon haven’t gone past the point of no return in pursuit of accessibility. If anything, Emperor of Sand proves the opposite. Musicians often rationalize losing their edge by talking about “maturity.” Mastodon can now feel free to use the word without lying to their fanbase.

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(Reprise)

Mastodon fans seem to come in two forms: disgruntled diehards who prefer “the early stuff” and an increasingly huge mainstream rock contingent who will doubtless be delighted by the straightforwardly melodic fare that makes up much of the band’s seventh album. The first four tracks all follow a familiar template, with drummer Brann Dailor driving everything along at a breathless clip and big, alt-rock refrains that, as memorable as they are, exhibit little of Mastodon’s much-celebrated progressive instinct. But then things pick up: Roots Remain is spellbinding, its twists and turns recalling the fizzing creativity that drove 2009’s Crack the Skye. Similarly, Andromeda sounds like a cross between NYC noise-rock gurus Unsane and Syd-era Pink Floyd, replete with wibbly-wobbly guitars and a whiff of lysergic mischief. The closing Jaguar God, a windswept psychedelic metal waltz, is the best thing here, and the one moment when Mastodon sound willing to fully challenge their listeners’ expectations.