Once More ‘Round the Sun, the band’s latest, tempers the mixtape approach of its predecessor. To some, the end product of that venture, 2011’s Mike Elizondo-produced The Hunter, constituted Mastodon’s jumping-the-Megalodon moment: too poppy, too giddy, and downright flimsy when compared to the steely grooves of the past. The prospect of a major metal album overseen by a superproducer like Elizondo struck many as sacrilege, but after a decade of weak-tea rock on the major labels, one couldn’t help but feel thrilled at the prospect of four storytellers re-shaping the world of popular heavy music. So it's easy to understand why, when Mastodon’s elemental epic reached its conclusion in 2009, they were tempted to set aside the prog epics in search of a new aural identity, one that could sublimate the esoteric monoliths of old into an accessible and mature sound. And so, four guys from Atlanta quickly earned the reputations as metal’s smartest, most unstoppable band of barbarians.
Ambitious as Mastodon’s concepts were, they avoided pretension by grounding their lofty thematics in crunchy, timeless riffage and a cross-pollinated sound combining Black Sabbath’s doom, Electric Wizard’s gloom, and King Crimson’s hyper-literate mad genius.
#MASTODON ONCE MORE ROUND THE SUN CRACK#
There was Leviathan’sterrifying Moby Dick, his arrival heralded by high-pressure riffs that seemed to issue forth from the Mariana trench, and the anti-hero of the earthy Blood Mountain, a direct invocation of American mythologist Joseph Campbell’s concept of “ The Hero With a Thousand Faces”-and, of course, there was Crack the Skye’s Rasputin, a historical villain recast as an otherworldly sage.
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