3 out of 5

Label: Reprise

Produced by: Brendan O’Brien

A little bit in to Mastodon’s Emperor of Sand, listening with fond memories of Once More ‘Round the Sun, and: something sounded different. Although the group has switched up producers semi-frequently, I suppose I was expecting Nick Raskulinecz to be on board again, and a glance at the credits confirmed what I was hearing: Brendan O’Brien’s work, with whom the group had partnered on Crack the Skye. A good album! …Which I don’t listen to much! And though I’m really, truly, sincerely, not in the habit of just quoting myself, after sitting with Emperor of Sand for a while, a key phrase from my Skye review reverberated quite loudly with how I was feeling post-Sand:

“Brendan O’Brien seems to rip the guts out of the disc in favor of fleshing out all the extras.”

To be fair, the ripping isn’t as dramatic at this point, since Mastodon has been on a trajectory of adding in extras (some extra studio polish and instrumentation; a bit more variation in song styles) pretty much since Skye, and Emperor of Sand is even slicker and smoother on that front, where it doesn’t feel like we’re underplaying the metal, necessarily, but this is a very, very processed version of the Mastodon sound, juggled very effectively with some singles-ready gloss. And perhaps even that this can’t elicit a more aggressive verb like ‘ripping’ is also somewhat telling.

EoS still rocks, of course, and it’s not wholly without teeth: every track has a breakdown of sorts, and the sequencing generally flips between songs that are more shouty and solo-y versus more singy and riffy, never quite allowing a judgey listener such as m’self to tune out. And this polish / gloss I’m criticizing isn’t without surprise, as we’re now longer into the shiny portion of Mastodon’s career than the pre-Reprise stuff and they’ve been able to really nail the craft of making a singular song have cross appeal, such as the equally heavy and poppy Roots Remain. It’s just that that also leads to a perfection of the accessibility of their music, where ho-hum singles like Show Yourself are hookless in a way that some modern singles are, and mid-album tracks Word to the Wise and Ancient Kingdom lay bare some structural similarities that hang over a lot of Mastodon’s music; the songs blend together.

The thing is, this is Mastodon improving on what they do, which has its imitators, for sure, but still remains as a fairly unique implementation of rock and metal, which allows their prog and hardcore influences room while still delivering a shiny final product. Producers like Raskulinecz have proven good at bringing the edges out of that sound, while producers like O’Brien excel at doing a Metallica, arena rock thing, and Mastodon lean fully into that here. Which is to say: again, this is a good album. I’m just pretty sure I won’t listen to it much.