#Once more round the sun crack

Throughout the majority of the album, those mammoth styles remain in constant collision with each other, often within the same song.

They never fully commit to either extreme, resulting in a frustratingly liminal listen. Clearly, though, they’re not willing to abandon their proggy roots entirely, leaving listeners (as well as themselves) trapped between two modes: the straightforward wallop of Foo Fighters-style rock, and the hard, nasty sludge of old. But the thin, uninspired harmonies gets taxing by the album’s proggier second half, and on the whole, Once More ’Round the Sun is easily the band’s weakest effort to date.įor two records now, Mastodon have jettisoned the overarching concepts of old for a simpler mission: to be a hard rock band making hard rock records. Occasionally their tag-team approach matches Mastodon’s lofty standards, as on the title-track, which deserves special mention for that goosebump-raising chord progression in the bridge. Nick Raskulinecz (Foo Fighters, Alice in Chains) was tapped to produce this time, and he brings a comparatively raw sound. Troy Sanders returns with a vastly improved vocal range, one honed in the groove-driven supergroup Killer Be Killed, and Brent Hinds remains the best screamer of the group-though it’s a shame he doesn’t get more opportunities to show it off. 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.

#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.