Mastodon – The Hunter

1. Black Tongue
2. Curl Of The Burl
3. Blasteroid
4. Stargasm
5. Octopus Has No Friends
6. All The Heavy Lifting
7.
8. Dry Bone Valley
9. Thickening
10. Creature Lives
11. Spectrelight
12. Bedazzled Fingernails
13. The Sparrow
The omens weren’t very good. A couple of months before the release of “” gave us “Deathbound”, a song that was a leftover from the “Crack The Skye” sessions and was part of a pretty obscure internet compilation. The song sounded pretty raw and rough, and sounded more like a song from the “Blood Mountain” period. This emphasized the rumours about the upcoming release: after their flirt with film music on “Jonah Hex” the band would write more compact and rawer songs than the rather proggy sounded “Crack The Skye”. Since this album is my favourite album of 2009, I wasn’t really enthusiastic about these rumours. Even though a continuation of the sound of “Crack The Skye” wasn’t a good idea either, since their live performance of this music couldn’t match the impact of the record (regarding “Live At Aragon” earlier this year and their live show in The Milky Way, Amsterdam two years ago). A difficult position for the band?
Hell no, off course not. Like the band gives a rat’s ass about my opinion and considerations? Still, the first two songs that were released, “Black Tongue” and “Curl Of The Burl”, validated my insecure thoughts. Although “Black Tongue” was rather cool, it was especially the nagging choruses in “Curl Of The Burl” that pisses me off, even now, thirty-something replays later. Therefore one of the weakest songs in the history of . The third song that was released before the album, “Stargasm” with Scott Kelly (Neurosis), was the most convincing one. Nevertheless, the first day I was spinning “” I couldn’t recreate the euphoric state I was in when I was listening for the first time to “Remission”, “Leviathan” and not even to the “Lifesblood EP”. Sure, it all sounded nice and pretty and okay and so, but it didn’t cracked my skull, boiled my blood and blew my brains to smithereens. Will “” become the second disappointment after “Blood Mountain” of one of my favourite bands?
The band has made some changes. The most visual change is obviously the artwork. They said goodbye (forever?) to Paul Romano and the beast with the three mouths (some kind of inbred between a dragon and a moose?) is a wooden sculpture made by one AJ Fosik. Rather strange that you won’t find his name anywhere in the credits on the album. Also the lyrics are different than in the past. The vague mythological abracadabra about nature are gone, and simple words, simple sentences and (seemingly) simple meanings are in. The short “Blasteroid” is the most illustrative redneck-example of this: ‘I wanna drink some fucking blood, I wanna break some fucking glass.’ Even Brann Dailor admits:’Something maybe a twelve year old would write, even the verses.’
Not only “Blasteroid” is short, the other songs are compact as well. Only two songs are longer than five minutes, and these are the epic ones with even a contemplative character. On these songs, the title and closing track, we hear another alteration in ‘s sound: these guys can actually sing! God damnit, why didn’t they do this earlier? Of course, the raging roars on the earlier albums are gone, but I was not really amused by one of the other vocal trading marks the band developed the last couple of years: the conscious nagging (harmony) vocals (like on “Curl Of The Burl”). I think one Ozzy is more than enough. So I am pleasantly surprised they have good singing voices, but maybe this is one of the talents of producer Mike Elizondo? On this album the vocals are more diverse than ever. In “Octopus Has No Friends” (yes, they haven’t forgotten Herman Melville) we hear they sing in a style that strongly reminds me of Jaz Coleman (Killing Joke) and a bit of Voivod too. This diversity is al