Culture

(2.5/5)

After hitting their commercial and creative stride with 2009's celestial Crack the Skye, American heavy metal outfit Mastodon return with their most vanilla album to date.
Felicitously titled The Hunter, this back-to-basics approach to their very own progressive sludge style seems deliberate and calculated, if not illogical. It’s certainly headstrong, and very much a Mastodon album (salivary opener ‘Black Tongue’ confirms this tenfold), but when inevitably compared to its revered predecessor, The Hunter can't help but feel unfocused, small-scale, and far too riff-oriented.
Stripping away the dense arrangements and sweeping mythology of the last couple of albums may be considered streamlining by some, but to me, those momentous, Floydian atmospheres are what segregated Mastodon from the appalling modern metal scene and actually made them memorable.
Furthermore, providing the opening track for the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie seems to have had a delayed effect; here Mastodon is a much goofier band, as reflected in The Hunter’s infamously ridiculous cover art and track titles such as ‘Stargasm’, ‘Bedazzled Fingernails’ and ‘Octopus Has No Friends’ (no, really).
Their shark-like fretwork and rolling drum-fills are as good as ever, but without the aether of Crack the Skye or the gargantuan chomp of voracious classics like Remission and Leviathan, it becomes hard to distinguish this incarnation of Mastodon from other radio-friendly ‘metal’ bands. Check out single ‘Curl of the Burl’, a lukewarm and toothless redux of Blood Mountain highlight ‘Colony of Birchmen’, for a representative taste.
Fans of bloodboiling and mosaic metal, you will be disappointed. Fans of microwaved sludge-rock or strangled farts, you’re probably in for a treat.