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Atlanta is rightfully known as the center of all things Dirty South, but its biggest buzz at the moment is the ferocious metal four-piece Mastodon. Riding on the heels of their lavishly praised Leviathan (2004), Mastodon have made the leap to the major labels with the aptly-titled Blood Mountain. So how much does it bleed? While not quite at that magnum opus level, when Mastodon stretches their standard fist-thrash-fury sonics on Blood Mountain, god face seems almost within reach.
Its opening salvo of "The Wolf Is Loose" and "Crystal Skull" are pure epinephrine rush—the kind of killing frenzy that makes a skinny 16-year-old feel like a NFL linebacker. They're both full of savage unrelenting rhythms, dizzying drop-on-a-dime time changes, and enough vocal panache to distinguish Mastodon from their faceless contemporaries. "Sleeping Giant" swells with a big undertow, swirling melody, scorch chorus and punctulated solos. And Blood Mountain's best moments come on "Colony Of Birchmen" and "This Mortal Soil," both radio-ready to fly high. It's probably no coincidence that Queens of the Stone Age's Josh Homme sports guest-backing vocals on "Colony"—it's as good a song as his own band has boasted to date, with its boogie-punch beat, muscle riffs and trippy-swirl vocals suitable for altered states. "Soil" starts as soft-edge acoustic, morphs into an Isis-like soar, drops into metal-rap, and then dips into a cauldron of doom-metal. What a heady skull fuck.
Metal fads and fashions transition rapidly, and the last five years have proved to be a boon, with bands like Isis, QOTSA and System Of A Down creating genre-pulverizing masterpieces. While the purists will surely revel in the majority of Mastadon's savage howl on Blood Mountain, the best moments within are when they reach for that something more. At those moments, it may sound like sellout, yet Blood Mountain is anything but. It's the sound of scraping against the sky's eye.
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