Title: The Hunter
Artiste: Mastodon
Genre: Progressive/Sludge Metal
Familiarity: I've heard
Blood Mountain: did not like it.
1. Black tongue: Decent opener; lot of power and anger to it.
2. Curl of the burl: Kind of more of a progressive tilt to this, sort of reminds me in places of Balance of Power... Guitar is pretty sweet on this.
3. Blasteroid: Meh, it's okay. Doesn't do too much for me.
4. Stargasm: Love the opening guitar here though. This could be a good one. Eh, not quite. Started off well but didn't quite live up to the promise of the opening. Still, best yet so far.
5. Octopus has no friends: Again it's okay, but I guess the problem is nothing is really standing out to me. It's all good-ish, but just nothing special.
6. All the heavy lifting: This has a very Threshold vibe in the vocal and the melody
7. The Hunter: Again a really gripping, dramatic sort of progressive guitar to open, but will it blossom into anything? Being the title track you would hope there would be some chance that this might blow away the cobwebs that have enveloped me in a cloud of “don't-care” since the album began. Well this is the first (only?) ballad so natch I'm going to be a bit kinder and more ready to listen to it. And it does seem to be very good indeed. Yeah, it's miles ahead of everything else so far.
8. Dry bone valley: Back to the kind of mediocre-okay-but-nothing-great tracks.
9. Thickening: This one has a bit of a blues swing to it. Yeah but it's sort of boring too. Meh.
10. Creature lives: This is better. Like the warped guitar, the Floydesque laughter, then the song itself is different enough to make me sit up and take notice. Yeah, this is good. Finally. Sort of a psychedelic feel to it.
11. Spectrelight: Meh. Kind of a sub-Manowar battle chant thing. Maybe.
12. Bedazzled fingernails: This at least is interesting. Has a clever thing going vocally.
13. The sparrow: And this is far better too. Sort of again psych feeling to it, slower, kind of dreamy. Good closer. Somewhat unexpected.
End result: Better than
BM, but again nothing that makes me go “Oh wow! I must now listen to all of Mastodon's albums!” My life, such as it is, will proceed just fine without their input.
So, Love or Hate? I can't really Meh it so I'll say I
Like it. Though I kind of don't really.