Where are we at these days with metal? I know we went through the ironic stage a couple of years back, yet how are we supposed to approach a band like Mastodon? Irony is one word you would certainly not associate with a four-piece who play it straight down the middle with tales of crystal skulls, mythical beasts and distant lands.
As you might suspect, this is unconstituted old school metal that owes as much to the halcyon days of Iron Maiden, Saxon and the rest as it does to any modern trends, even with the leftfield patronage of Josh Homme and the Mars Volta. That of course is part of what has enabled metal to maintain its longevity, the fact that every generation throws up a new wave of teenage boys for whom this is life changing stuff.
For this year’s crop, it’s entirely possibly that Blood Mountain could be their Number Of The Beast or Wheels Of Steel. Those with the benefit of slightly more experience, however, will find that Mastodon offer little that’s particularly new. Extreme, passionate and over the top it may be (the album opens with a drum solo), but it’s also slightly empty, the sound of four young men making a racket that ultimately fails to connect on any sort of meaningful level.
It offers nothing we haven’t heard before or indeed won’t hear again, which is probably the whole point. Blood Mountain is the generation gap captured in sound, an album that will mean an awful lot to some and absolutely nothing to everybody else and for that Mastodon are perhaps the true essence of rock ‘n’ roll.