Mastodon
Cold Dark Place

If there was a shortcoming and a potential limitation in this band's solid musical proposal, it might have been in their choice to make songs that didn't breathe and didn't let you breathe. Over these fifteen years, Mastodon have hardly ever given a break to their rhythms, hardly ever slowed down their pace. Even metal music eventually needs to breathe, to look within. With Crack the Skye, there was the most significant opening to broader structures, but the pace was always frenetic, except for a few passages. Put it better, the stylistic core of the pieces always matched with the accelerations, with the most impetuous whirlwinds.

For a band that makes frenetic (or even erratic) drumming one of its cornerstones, an album like this Cold Dark Place represents the definitive surpassing of adolescence, the phase of being virtuosos at all costs. And thus, it is the arrival at a finally singer-songwriter-like, human, more moody and less performative dimension.

It took an EP that is actually the guitarist Brent Hinds’s, perhaps the true absolute genius of the band. A rock-metal strummed under the moonlight, black and lost in a very intricate forest, as depicted in Richey Beckett's magnificent cover. In Hinds' compositions, the other three inserted themselves, proving they can also work finely, adding depth and solidity to the sound of the tracks without doping them.

This is what struck me the most: the mastodons, who wanted to highlight their pachydermal power since their name, now no longer do anything to hide their fragility. It is a painful, wounded humanity that Hinds sings with his unmistakable harsh tone. It is disappointed love, a sense of solitude and coldness. It's a face-to-face encounter with the beast: «I walk alone, into the darkness / I came toe to toe and face to face with the beast».

The journey through pain already had an important prelude in the album from this spring. In Jaguar God, another such encounter occurred: «It's right in front of me / The throne of maladies / It's right in front of me / Your malignancy». But the words didn’t correspond to a musical journey of similar openness to fragility.

Emperor of Sand is an almost perfect album, in my view, but it’s a performative, studied, thought-out album, especially from the musical compartment's perspective. This is the opposite; it's a song that truly comes from the human feeling of a musician, who sketches out four chords and then chisels around them actual tracks, but that maintain the necessary respect for the initial mood. It's truly remarkable because this subdued tone remains perceptible even though there are riffs, rhythms, tempo changes, vocal intersections, and so on. And solos that are spat out of the guitar with so much anger. In short, all the elements that made Mastodon famous are here but reformulated in a finally new guise, classic rock and singer-songwriter-esque, that has something to say, a spark of feeling to pass on, more than the need to show off the muscles of technique, a thing many bands know how to do.

In the track that gives the album its title, you can feel a dark, medieval nightmare air. Few plucks on the guitar strings, sinister echoes, reverberations. Adolescent Mastodon would have imposed a sudden change midway, an outburst of drumming and many riffs. Instead, this time it goes differently: the song’s beating heart lies in the atmospheres, the abyssal descents, the vertiginous horror vacui, and the almost ecclesiastical choirs. That’s the essential quid. The electric guitar bursts in only at the end, like a blessing, a catharsis that without the preceding tragedy would have been meaningless.