Separating the top five albums this year – each
so astronomically superior to anything else – has proved problematic, and the
fact that I’ve end up having to list an album as utterly awesome as Once More ‘Round the Sun as the fifth best album of 2014 seems
ridiculous. Nonetheless, there it is. This is Mastodon’s
best record in years, since 2006’s Blood Mountain (continuing the upward
curve of their 2011 return to form, The
Hunter). They have evolved yet again:
where their early work was intricate yet extremely heavy prog-metal, and The Hunter shifted into more
straightforward riff-led territory, Once More ‘Round the Sun has more of a
pop sensibility than anything they have done before. This is ‘pop’ in a very loose sense, of
course. They’re still a notably heavy
heavy metal band, but there’s more melody to be found here than one might
expect from an initial listen. The
obvious example is ‘The Motherload’, which is the sort of metal song that people
who don’t like metal might like, with a catchy chorus and groovy verse. There are still some really quite odd
progressive moments: the (bizarrely chosen) lead-single ‘High Road’ has a riff
with a pleasingly jarring time signature (although even that explodes into a
hummable chorus). Other highlights
include the ending to ‘Aunt Lisa’, which sounds like the kids from Pink Floyd’s ‘Another Brick in the Wall:
Part II’ have grown up and turned really nasty, and the picked opening guitar refrain
from ‘Halloween’ (a riff that Metallica
would be most proud of). Once More ‘Round the Sun is an
exceptional album by a truly exceptional metal band. In fact, they have again transcended the
limitations of their genre so spectacularly over the years that calling them ‘metal’ actually
gives quite the wrong impression.
sample
track: The Motherload