Mastodon - Cold Dark Place

I'm excited. In a few months we should have a new Mastodon album. That's a long time, but we can kill a few of those minutes by listening to their 2017 Cold Dark Place EP. 3 leftovers from Once More 'Round The Sun and one from Emporer of Sand. My review of Emperor of Sand wasn't as down on it as most, but it is true that it's nowhere near the top of the list of Mastodon albums you might recommend to a friend who doesn't know Mastodon. 

Let's ignore all of that and pretend we randomly snatched it out of the air in a post-apocalyptic world where they put albums inside relief packages and drop them from helicopters. In the spirit of that context, let's try to understand what we're dealing with. 

We'll just have to trust them on the temperature reading, but it is by all objective standards dark. It's also a forest and the auxiliary artwork (not pictured) focuses on a heart made out of tree roots. If we get out the binoculars we can see a silhouette and a strange candle. You do you, but i'm going with Radagast is riding the struggle bus so he invites Yorick to watch him get shitfaced on fermented tree sap. 

Tolkien himself believed Radagast had failed in his mission, but he was surprisingly bad at understanding his own mythologies, so we'll go with Christopher's take that because he was specifically sent to protect the plants and animals of Middle Earth he sort of succeeded, but we'll add Bottle's caveat that he totally succeeded in his mission, but because humans, dwarves, and elves are bound by the rings whether they wear them or not, why would the useless bipeds give a crap. The Blue Wizards went looking for the Teletubby Sun Baby and were never heard from again. Why's that joke here? Baxter Forrest Twilight, duh. You should all have my first book memorized by now (kidding). 

Sadly, they didn't print the lyrics, so i either have to search online or [shudder] try to understand them myself. Troy and Brent are great, but man are they inarticulate sometimes. 

Interestingly, the album doesn't have a beginning; fade in intro, obviously, but this is an internal track, a deep cut. It's more like the washes of sound on Crack the Skye to my ears. I'm speaking musically, by the way, lyrics don't matter much other than "the north" and "cold." Is this around the time of their Game of Thrones cameo? Doesn't matter. I'm going to listen to it like 9 times tonight, by the way. This first pass is just things that stick out. 

What the hell is Blue Walsh? Is Walsh a person or a thing? We may never know. What's more interesting is that it also sounds more like a Crack the Skye leftover that anything on Once More 'Round the Sun. This is Brent's chicken pickin' like the banjo on Divinations. 

More chicken pickin'. Its called that because chickens have three toes (4 toes, but we don't care about the backward one), you hold the pick like normal but you also use you middle and ring fingers. 

Toe to Toe gives us "dark." Yep, we're good actually. Concept covered. Lovely song. 

"I guess you'd say...." Did i mention that these songs sound more like Crack the Skye outakes? They do. I don't think that's an actual conscious thing on Mastodon's part. These songs obviously don't fit the last two full length albums, but over the span of 8 years it's totally logical that that kind of subconscious uncannyness would pop up a few times. Surely someone somewhere along the process said "this sounds too much like that one album we made that time. Better try something different." 

Ok, time for actual words. What are these songs about?  

M: Winter is coming. 

B: Yes, yes, i see your point.  

M: i'm asleep in the deep.

B: oh, ok that's obviously tied to Once More... 

M: i remember...

B: running through the wet grass? Yep, me too, every morning on the way to the chicken coop. Not the running part, though. Bottle's insides do not share James Bond's predilection for shaking. I mention it only to point out that i like Mastodon better that Better Than Ezra, but go on.

M: iiaaoeoeuueaiaue

B: damnit, Brent. Words have consonants. E. Nun. Sea. Ate. 

I give up, we'll have to pull up the actual lyrics and read for the next listen. I absolutely adore Mastodon's harmony. The harmonic rhythm is tectonic plate slow, but the chord progressions are absolutely gorgeous. A lot of people cry foul at Brendan O'Brien's "over production," but every picked note has 9 layers on 9 different guitars because it's Mastodon. Pearl Jam, STP, even Springsteen don't have Mastodon's confuddling conjunction of ADD and Tibetan Monk level patience for crafting sonic architecture. "I want it to sound like a Fender Champ combined with a Soldano Slo 100, but i also want an acoustic attack and the shimmer of a dulcimer. Yeah, sure, i'll play those 3 notes 40 more times, i just need another beer and bong hit first. Again, Mastodon can handle my smack talk, they're big boys. Brent wasn't on the fence about the head tattoo 'cause he's looking for a promotion to store manager, he just flat out doesn't give a shit. 

Ok, actual lyrics time. 

North Side Star is a "you and i" song. The world is going to end, but maybe we can walk around the wreckage together. 

I think Blue Walsh is about him dying and she's a ghost, maybe. It's either a "blues riff that sounds like joe walsh" or somehow connected to one of Steve Walsh's sons named Blue (Steve Walsh was lead singer of Kansas and lives in Atlanta). 

Hello, Satan. May i have this dance? 

I don't love you anymore. 

So, strip away all the hyperbole and junk, this is a breakup album. I don't mean that to sound underwhelming, but that's what the 4 songs do together. It's quite lovely, actually. The world is ending, we can't communicate, we need to go our separate ways. It's his description of the cold dark place the relationship has created in his mind. Stellar, superb, great album, excellent job guys. See, everyone, that's how you make an album that's both enjoyable to listen to and conceptually rewarding when you really dig in with only 4 random songs. A-plus, thumbs up, sorry 'bout the breakup fictional narrator dude, but excellent job of telling us about it.