With a new Mastodon record on the horizon, the number one question people are asking themselves is ‘what exactly is it going to sound like?’
Coming off an album like The Hunter which transitioned into short, succinct ‘rock songs’ from the grandiose prog epics of Crack The Skye, naturally people were going to have some strong feelings about it. Personally, I loved it, as much as I enjoyed CTS, it was nice to see the band doing something different — but there was a fairly loud and vocal (minority?) group asking for the band to return to their previous prog influences. However, in a recent discussion with ArtistDirect.com, bassist/vocalist Troy Sanders revealed:
“I think, to a degree, it picks up where we left off. As always, nothing was really pre-determined and spoken of beforehand like, “Okay guys, we need to write a lot of long epic songs and a lot of short sweet songs. We need to have a couple of slow ones”. Nothing like that was predetermined verbally amongst the four of us. We go in there and we kind of pick up on whatever comes through Brent and Bill’s fingers and their guitars and build and build. I guess it’s going to be more of a continuation of where we left off with The Hunter. Hopefully, it’s just a collection of good Mastodon rock ‘n’ roll songs. That’s where it’s headed.”
Obviously, it’s not set in stone yet, if I had a 10 pence piece for every band that said their upcoming record was their heaviest/catchiest/techiest/loudiest(?) yet and left me disappointed, then I’d have exactly £2.74. But you can’t help but think that some people are going to be a little disappointed with this news. Me, on the other hand… I’ll be blasting ‘All The Heavy Lifting‘ over and over again because it’s by far one of the best things they’ve ever done.
JUST CLOSE YOUR EYEEEEEEEEEES
– DL