At least in certain respects, Mastodon’s Emperor of Sand might well be metal’s answer to Rush’s mainstream-conquering 1981 classic Moving Pictures. For its seventh studio outing, the Atlanta quartet reins-in its prodigious technical abilities without watering them down. As Metallica’s black album famously showed, this is no easy feat. Mastodon haven’t had an easy go of it either, but fans who thought 2014’s Once More ’Round the Sun veered uncomfortably close to radio-friendly should give Emperor of Sand a chance.
That’s not to say this new album isn’t stuffed to the gills with melodic singing—you can expect to hear a bunch of these songs on commercial radio this summer. Opener “Sultan’s Curse,” for one, is a trademark Mastodon gallop that again shows guitarist/vocalist Brent Hinds doing his best impression of Soundgarden frontman Chris Cornell. Second track “Show Yourself” starts out with a bouncy, almost danceable boogie-rock hook before reverting to one of Mastodon’s zig-zagging riffs. Be warned: If you see clean singing as a concession, you’re going to have issues with this album. And if you’re wary of returning Crack the Skye producer Brendan O’Brien—famous for helming ’90s blockbusters by Pearl Jam and Stone Temple Pilots—you should know that, as usual, O’Brien smooths out some of the band’s angular edges. But unlike the last album, Emperor of Sand’s balance tips back to what Mastodon built a reputation on.
Over their first three proper full-lengths—2002’s Remission, 2004’s Leviathan, and 2006’s Blood Mountain—Mastodon flexed their chops almost like a sports team that had more to prove the more successful it got. By 2009’s Crack the Skye, a concept album that revisits Tsarist Russia via Stephen Hawking, Mastodon’s lyrics had grown as lofty as the music. At the same time, Crack the Skye contained hints that a more tempered approach was coming. The band’s three lead vocalists—Hinds, bassist Troy Sanders, and drummer Brann Dailor—began to exchange death metal howls for increasingly melodic singing. The transition to concise songs on 2011’s The Hunter might have come as a shock if you were a fan of the 13-minute rollercoaster suites that incorporated death, thrash, Southern, and traditional heavy metal. But the hooks had been lurking all along.
Nevertheless, if you’re partial to Mastodon’s longer, classical-influenced songs, you’re not going to see Emperor of Sand’s appeal—unless you zoom-out and take the album as one complete work. That’s not difficult to do now that Mastodon have finally mastered the art of writing 11 tracks that flow together as one. Like The Hunter and Once More ’Round the Sun, each of the songs on Emperor of Sand stands alone, musically speaking. But this time, the band took a page from Crack the Skye to spin an elaborate yarn about the passage of time, using sand as a metaphor for mortality but also as a window to set the story in the deserts of ancient Arabia. In true Mastodon fashion, the album’s protagonist attempts to communicate telepathically with African and Native American tribes in hopes that they’ll make it rain on his behalf.
The plot gets way, um, thicker than that, but suffice it to say the band leaves plenty of room to geek-out on the lyrics. More compellingly, Emperor of Sand marks the third Mastodon album directly inspired by a bandmember’s loss of a relative, in this case the untimely passing of guitarist Bill Kelliher’s mother. That Mastodon are capable of channeling personal tragedies into madcap sci-fi fantasy is impressive, but on Emperor of Sand they finally harness their musical ambitions as well.
Without fail, whenever a song on Emperor of Sand feels like it’s about to go overboard on the polish, the band takes it in a more jagged direction. Conversely, whenever a song runs close to rehashing Mastodon’s familiar bag of tricks, the band steps up its tastefulness and songcraft. The timing is so uncanny that you might not even notice. Meanwhile, Dailor—never a drummer you could accuse of under-playing—doesn’t so much tone down his playing so much as shift between varying degrees of busy. It makes a tremendous difference, adding dynamics to what was once an endless flurry of fills and rolls.
During the bridge section of “Clandestiny,” an ascending Tony Banks-style synthesizer line stamps Dailor’s long-professed love of Genesis’ prog opus The Lamb Lies Down on Broadway onto Emperor of Sand’s sleeve. Unlike Genesis, however, Mastodon haven’t gone past the point of no return in pursuit of accessibility. If anything, Emperor of Sand proves the opposite. Musicians often rationalize losing their edge by talking about “maturity.” Mastodon can now feel free to use the word without lying to their fanbase.
