THE HUNTER

Mastodon

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

3.68 | 449 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

nikow

The Hunter is definitely one of the best albums of this year.

While Crack the Skye was a full blown concept album with few songs reaching over the 10 minute marker, The Hunter gives us diversity in a stripped down and more compact form.

13 songs, and not one of them can be said to be a filler. Also the stylistic diversity to be found on this album is incredible, there's old style fast and aggressive Mastodon (Black Tongue, Spectrelight), more commercial sounding hard rock songs (Curl of the Burl for instance), more spacey explorations (Stargasm, The Hunter, The Sparrow) and also some experiments like the wonderful Creature Lives. Despite this all, the album is tied together with the trademark Mastodon sound: Brann Dailor's extremely busy drumming, off-the-wall riffing and the familiar double vocals by Hinds and Sanders.

One sector where the band succeeds better than ever before are the vocal melodies. They were great even before, but this time they have managed to add lot more to them, making the melodies melancholically aching at times but always pleasing the ear. Also the singing has improved. There are also more keyboards, a trend started with Crack the Skye. While on CtS some of the keyboards didn't seem to fit perfectly to the music they complement the sound perfectly this time around.

Mastodon is a band that can't be classified to any genre in particular, except saying that they are a rock'n'roll band. With The Hunter they manage to be progressive while keeping the songs compact (the longest is the closer The Sparrow, clocking in at 5:30).

This is progressive rock in the true sense of the word. An album of the highest caliber, 5 stars.

nikow | 5/5 | 2011-10-9

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