Mastodon
Sultan's Curse

I don't really hear much of Blood Mountain, as has been written here and there, in this new Mastodon single. It's a good track, which reconfirms the sharpness of a band that has made very few mistakes in its almost two-decade-long career. But what could this song suggest about the album coming out on March 31, Emperor of Sand? Well, the comparison with the opening tracks of the two previous albums seems indicative. The trend is towards a progressive slimming down: from Black Tongue, heavy, pachydermic, slow, and emphatic in an almost cloying way, we moved to the more lively and syncopated Tread Lightly, which still maintained airy spaces, in my opinion, excessively airy in the expanded chorus. In the new track, there's a further pruning of anything that might seem superfluous, depriving the melodies of breath, compacting the different sections into a mere 4 minutes.

There's still a bit of everything: the hammering riff in the opening, Troy Sanders' aggressive verse, Brent Hinds' sour, nasal, and stretched chorus; there's the rarefied pause, the brutal and angry restart; Brann Dailor's almost pop melodic variation, Hinds' virulent and essential solo. What Mastodon has been carrying forward for three albums now is a high-quality and effective mannerism; one must also be able to repeat oneself without getting boring. If The Hunter succeeded in part, the 2014 album did it better. The one coming out in 2017, in my opinion, promises to be a less catchy version of Once More 'Round the Sun, less worried about being liked at all costs. It might seem little, but it's not: I've listened to Sultan's Curse so many times in the last 24 hours, and I haven't gotten tired of it at all. This is because it is so compressed, compact, devoid of airy openings, layered between furious melodies and rhythms that it truly requires numerous listens to be fully absorbed.

The structure is, in any case, quite standard, clearly recalling those of the two mentioned opening songs, but it gives the listener less space to get comfortable. And so, the rhythmic variation that arrives halfway through, as it did in Black Tongue, is less predictable and clichéd because it’s more compact and tight, just as Hinds’ chorus never becomes cloying because it comes and goes in an instant. This slimming down confirms the process described by the band: from the double album that was being talked about, they've arrived at a single album of just 51 minutes. And looking at the lengths of the other songs, all quite short, one can perhaps guess what the stylistic hallmark of Emperor of Sand will be. I don't see any major returns to the style of their earlier works; it's enough for me if it's a meaner, tighter, and more hammering version of the previous record.