As Mastodon begins what figures to be a year-plus touring cycle behind its new CD, “The Hunter,” bassist/singer Troy Sanders is feeling something that doesn’t always happen at this stage.
“I’m not tired of our new record yet,” he said.
Bands that are bored by a CD that has just been released are more common than one might suspect — and for understandable reasons.
“Once this record actually comes out in stores, after you wrote it and you recorded it and you’ve been listening to it and fixing it, you’ve been listening to it nonstop for six months,” Sanders explained.
“Once it (a CD) comes out, sometimes you’re like, ‘I’m glad it’s out for the world to hear, but I’m kind of burned out on it at the moment.’ But the four of us are still very much into ‘The Hunter’ and that’s a very, very good sign.”
Chances are, Mastodon fans will be stoked about “The Hunter” when they first hear it, and for some time after that.
That’s because it might just be the best heavy metal CD of 2011. The 13 songs on “The Hunter” offer considerable variety.
There’s the mix of flowing melody and screamy mayhem of “Blasteroid,” and the psychedelic edge of the first single, “Curl of the Burl” (a song that has a bit of a Queens of the Stone Age feel). “Creature Lives” has an almost orchestral feel with its stacked backing vocals and grand guitar riffs and leads. “The Sparrow,” an epic ballad, evokes more than a little Pink Floyd in its dreamy and elegant feel.
Some of the passion Sanders and his bandmates — guitarist/singer Brent Hinds, drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher — still get for “The Hunter” stems from the amount of enjoyment that came from writing and recording the CD.
Since forming in Atlanta in late 1999, Mastodon had released a series of thematic CDs (“Remission” in 2002, “Leviathan” in 2004, “Blood Mountain” in 2006 and “Crack The Skye” in 2009), and Sanders figured the obvious move would have been to continue on that path.
Instead the band decided to take a 180-degree turn.
“We just really flipped the lid over and changed everything. Doing that was the most therapeutic thing we could have ever done for ourselves,” Sanders said. “I don’t think it’s reinventing ourselves, but it was just like hey, I think the world is going to expect this. We’re going to give you the total opposite.”
Sanders conceded that making the kind of thematically linked, highly involved CDs that had culminated with “Crack The Skye” had sometimes made the writing and recording of the preceding albums a grind. But when writing began in March, it was quickly clear that a simpler approach was emerging.
“(We said) let’s come down here, someone spark up a riff, let’s get in the song, let’s get out,” Sanders said. “It just seemed very obvious that we wanted to make a sharp left turn and get back to basics, so to speak, and just have more fun down there writing less complex, more energetic songs.”
The result is a CD that feels less weighty lyrically and is exceptionally tuneful for a heavy rock record. It’s not bubbly, but it’s not as dark as one might expect with a Mastodon CD. The irony is that “The Hunter” was made right after aperiod when the band had encountered tragedy.
Guitarist/singer Brent Hinds lost his brother, Brad, in December 2010 to a fatal heart attack. Not long after that, a close friend of the group passed away after a battle with cancer.
The band members used their sadness as fuel for “The Hunter” Project. But rather than letting their emotions lead them down a dark path, they sought to channel their feelings into something more positive.
The two songs that most directly relate to these two tragedies — “The Sparrow” and “The Hunter” — give the CD its most elegant moments.
“What I’m real proud of with my bandmates is collectively we can take something from a very dark and negative place, channel that emotion through the art, which we call Mastodon, and attempt to create something beautiful that will live forever from that,” Sanders said.
“In my opinion, that’s the most uplifting and best thing you can do, to prevail over that event and be triumphant to some degree,” he said. “So that’s what we attempt to do with our music. And the songs ‘The Sparrow’ and ‘The Hunter,’ the title track, are easily the two most beautiful songs on our record.”
There’s a good chance “The Sparrow” and “The Hunter” may find their way into Mastodon’s live shows this fall.
“We’re doing about half of the new record,” Sanders said. “We’re playing a 90-minute set. There are 22 songs in the set list. It’s half of the new record and then a mixed bag of hits from the previous four records. So it’s kind of a little something for everybody. Obviously, we’re very, very excited to play this new material live.”
