Mark is right - Mastodon are awesome

I've not paid a lot of attention to the heavy metal world since about the mid 1990s, once the Power 30 was shuffled off the daytime schedule of Much Music and replaced with Loud, and new bands seemed only interested in out-heavying each other and the punk rock aesthetic cowed any aspiring band out of making melodic music.

Meanwhile, metal bands from the 1980s still claim space on record store shelves. Why? Because people still buy their music.

Thus my reaction when I got Mastodon's CDs, Remission and especially Leviathan, about three quarters through the first songs on each album, was to whisper “finally”, turn the volume up, close my eyes, and experience something I haven't had the pleasure of hearing for a long time, good, new metal music that built on the sound of death metal, re-integrated melodic guitars and singing from the now-unfashionable old metal era, and added blasts of straight-ahead rock bridges appearing when you're not expecting them.

And then there's the jazz element. The drum tracks, taken by themselves, could easily be the backing for any three-piece jazz set. The circular drumming style is something I remember standing out as being the other unique part of The Jimmy Hendrix Experience, where the drummer, Mitch Mitchell, was driven by competitiveness to try and innovate as much as Hendrix himself did on the guitar.

The songs also have a freer feeling than most metal songs, where rigidity is paramount and bands are praised for being able to play a song exactly as it sounds on the album to the note. The feel of Mastodon's songs, especially the ones on Leviathan, is that they are each exploring what sounds good and what they can do around the other players, re-trying previous phrasings with some new flavour. Where you could bring a stopwatch to a Metallica concert, with Mastodon you get the impression that they could continue playing and exploring around a given song for another 10 minutes.

The flip side of this direction is that each individual song isn't a well-defined and laid out atomic entity, where I could map out each of the parts of a Megadeth or Kyuss song and understand why they fit where they do, and see the carefully arranged quality of the songs, with Mastodon you are listening to a musician-driven rather than songwriter-driven piece of music, and it doesn't fit as comfortably in your memory as other bands' music, just as a John Coltrane or Artie Shaw record doesn't lend itself to being memorized note-for-note the way a piece of classical music does. But it's interesting that someone is finally taking this mindset to the metal world, and very satisfying to hear it hold up so well.

And if that wasn't enough ambition for a band who's first CD was only released two years previously, the entire album is an epic re-telling of Moby Dick, rock-opera style.

Links:
Leviathan reviews at Pitchfork, Allmusic and RuthlessReviews.
Technorati Tags: Music, Metal, Mastodon