The powerful foursome from Atlanta known as Mastodon have an incredibly storied history as a unit, but are interesting and developed enough individuals in order to have lived full lives outside of their main project. We’ve been lucky to see fairly recent developments in Brent Hinds teaming up with Alice in Chains‘ William DuVall for Giraffe Tongue Orchestra, Bill Kelliher‘s grind-punk five-piece in PRIMATE, and Troy Sanders taking on both Gone is Gone and Killer Be Killed in his spare time.
Drummer Brann Dailor has been strangely absent outside of Mastodon. Outside of having been a founding member of tech-death band Lethargy, his credits were sparse. However, it seems he’s been cooking up something that’s a bit heavy on the electronics, because we now have a taste of Arcadea!
Arcadea isn’t exactly the side project you’d expect from Dailor, considering the vast differences the other members of Mastodon have found in their sound. Arcadea presents us with a sound that’s all-too-similar to Mastodon itself, especially during their post-Crack the Skye era. A lot of the presentation certainly sounds like material that could have easily ended up on Once More ‘Round the Sun, but we only have one track to work with right now.
Yeah, it’s not always in our best interest to post about a project with only a single song available, but sometimes something prods you in the right direction to talk and you can consider this a bit more in the line of “Hey, keep an eye out for this when it drops!” instead of a full-fledged “Hey! Listen to this!”
The foundation of “Gas Giant” is certainly Dailor’s notable drumming, ever-present as it is with Mastodon, but just muted enough to be overtaken by the kaleidoscopic synthesizers provided by Zruda guitarist/keyboardist Core Atoms and Withered guitarist Raheem Amlani. You can consider Arcadea as something between Mastodon and The Algorithm, with a favoring towards Mastodon, as you can clearly hear. Absolutely no guitars ended up on the record, being driven entirely by synths and drums.
If you like what you’re hearing above, there are nine more tracks on the way (read: ten tracks total) when the self-titled drops via Relapse Records on June 16th, 2017.