Mastodon
Hushed and Grim

To my detriment
To my detriment

It almost sounds like a litany. There are multiple mantras that Troy, Brann, and Brent (on fewer occasions) repeat throughout this collective prayer. A secular rite, a great requiem mass that seeks and finds in the instinctive spirituality of these four rough fellows (with great hearts) its sense of being and reiterating. A beastly song, that chews pain to transform it into the cure, the medicine (Pain with an Anchor) that saves from the depressive coils of loss. A wild cry of great humanity and vulnerability, which precisely in adverse circumstances rises around tall walls of creativity, a shield of strength and muscles because it senses the heart's alarm. But those cyclopean edifices reveal among their granite stones a fragile secret: the formation and rebirth of men through the most intimate sufferings, a necessary pain. The impossibility of taking a different path.

And so the prog rock mass unfolds in its forms, recites psalms, and raises hymns, spreads drapes, lights lamps, and makes space in the most hidden recesses of the soul. The journey cannot be short, it cannot be easy. An effort that seems like an ascent, a transhumance. It is bathed by the tears shed by the howling guitar of Brent Hinds. The eternal lament. Every station of the Via Crucis requires the complete repetition of the rite (progressive labyrinths, intertwined melodies, gloomy atmospheres, shining embroidery, final solo), an initiatory path to exorcise the denial of being and reconstruct a horizon of reality. The process is painful, exhausting, but also exhilarating. The joy and burden of getting lost in a grandiose work. In the end, we will resurrect to new life, but the harsh lands to cross are vast, they must be sifted thoroughly. And the words, never felt so deeply, feed us with gall, we drink the uninterrupted flow of tears. Around hyenas, crows, soul devourers. But our armor does not betray us.

The most sincere and naked confessions ring with an absurd beauty that seems to contradict their pain but are in truth supreme affirmation and sublimation. Because the rebirth that awaits us at the end, in the austere orchestrations of the concluding Gigantium, is as sweet as the hellish ridges we have crossed on the path are harsh. A new light, a different self-awareness, an inner growth that would not have been possible without the mourning, the denial.

It makes you want to cry, savoring certain ecstatic flashes (Teardrinker) that tear apart the leaden and hostile textures of the labyrinth that unfolds around. Extreme musical maximalism: like a punishment, a penance to atone for the guilt of powerlessness in the face of the end. The litany, the electric cry of the guitar resonates eternally.

It is by losing everything that we rediscover we are capable of anything. And these fifteen songs do nothing but prove it. After death, there can only be life. And looking into the abyss that sucked in Nick, the dearly departed, we can only feel a vertigo never known before, the horror of emptiness, which dissolves everything. But afterward, let us repeat, there can only be life, again, triumphant. And so ends a funereal album that was easy to imagine black and sulfurous. It ends with a renewed adherence to existence. An anthem that appears even more beautiful precisely because it is bathed in tears.

P.s.

A few days have passed. In a clearer mind, I can say that this album manages to conserve the terrifying energy of the best times, giving it indeed an even more tangible dimension thanks to Bottrill's intelligent production: I have never heard Dailor's drums so present in the economy of the song's sound. So three-dimensional. You have to turn up the volume knob, and you will fully enjoy these vast and jagged scenarios so well-conceived and crystallized on the record.

Energy and violence, but purely bone-crushing tracks are few. There are doom digressions (More Than I Could Chew, the first half of Gobblers of Dregs), there are countless prog textures (Sickle and Peace, the second half of Gobblers that recalls Genesis), and much more. We have some pure ballads, infused with melancholy and threatened by the abyss of pain: Skeleton of Splendor is essentially acoustic, and it is one of the album's peaks. The same goes for Had It All. Sanders' voice taps into the deepest chords of the soul.

And there is more. I challenge you to resist the slightly drunken southern cadences of The Beast, a creature of the almighty Brent Hinds (a reference to Toe to Toes), which blend with the umpteenth progressive delights and Dailor's clean voice. Not to mention the dark and ambient textures of Dagger, or the paradisiacal shoegaze of the concluding Gigantium.

When they go straight (so to speak), the victory is all too easy. And so here and there they serve us the outbursts and speed of Pushing the Tides, Peace and Tranquillity, Savage Lands. And in all this, keep in mind that I have not yet mentioned two of the strongest pieces. The epilogue's epitaph of Pain With an Anchor, with the crying guitar and that seismic finale, and the luminous Teardrinker, where the pain shines with an almost unbearable beauty.

A summary and a step forward, it is no longer "just" sludge metal, it is not "just" prog. There is a bit of everything, and everything is done right. In some passages, they recall the Pink Floyd of Wish. In the face of life's truly probing questions, our guys have realized that limiting themselves to confines like musical genres is belittling. They have definitively opened their horizons. Existence must be celebrated in its fullness, embracing even its end, and exploring its infinite possibilities, even artistic ones.