Wo Fat
The Conjuring

"The new Mastodon is out!!!"
"Stoner and sludge are all the same, the records are always the same!"
"Stoner albums all sound the same to me!"
"How cool is the new Mastodon? Even my girlfriend listened to it yesterday before going to dance class, and she really liked it!"

Oh, the new Mastodon is out!!
Well, you remember Wo Fat, right? Five albums; one massive and a frame of four other enjoyable elementary works but ultimately useless. Then, yes, in the end, the genre is what it is, and the risk of repetitiveness is almost a demand of the genre itself, besides being a constant risk lurking around the corner. But there are works that mean a lot even though they are close to the more anonymous ones. I don't know what makes Psychedelonaut better than 90% of the stoner albums released in the last ten years, but my friend, if you like the genre and you give it a listen, you'll probably agree with me. If, on the other hand, you find the genre boring, then you can look elsewhere because maybe you're right and we're wrong, but, like it or not, here we talk about stÔner and if it sucks to you, we can't do anything about it.

We were saying: one amazing record, four works avoidable by anyone who doesn't exclusively listen to stöner, and then, boom, the fifth album in 2014. I didn’t think I'd ever talk about these guys again, Psychedelonaut said everything a group could say about the lack of inspiration the genre now had and still has but, thanks be to god, there are bands with success if not unjustified, at least inexplicable like Mastodon. And then a couple of things come to mind. Don’t get me wrong: as much as I find them unlistenable due to personal tastes, Mastodon is a really good group. What I find absurd is how many people like them... I mean, I saw them play on the David Letterman Show... Mastodon?!?
We have to assume that they are an easy listening group, appealing, catchy and... No, Mastodon has nothing to do with all this. This work by Wo Fat, however, does. ... Well, oh dear...

It's time for the numbers...
Four substantial tracks and a seventeen-minute suite, for a total of forty-five minutes of music. The antithesis of easy listening on paper. And yet... No, seriously, I don't get it: Mastodon on TV and nobody gives a damn about these guys... Not that I'm trying to make a comparison between the two, mind you, I just want to highlight that if Mastodon deserves to enjoy media glory, then these blessed Texan guys should be listened to by more people.

The album is a classic, it screams Fu Manchu from every pore like the previous ones: after all, whether it's FM or WF, it's always about a villain with a Chinese twist... Moreover, compared to what happened in the two previous works, there's a bit more space (a lot of space, enough to at least double the property value), which at the end makes it very Psychedelonaut, and consequently does a lot of good for the stoned movement. So to cut a long story short: yes, it's true that st?ner is incredibly repetitive, but if you go crazy for the Mastodons, there's so much psychedelic heavy rock that you should and can definitely listen to, that half of it is enough.

Then if you want to stick to Mastodon because "they are so technical," go ahead, everyone has their own shitty tastes.