Mastodon - Hushed and Grim

Oh my. Hushed and Grim, where to even begin to preamble talking about it [motor boat sound]. 

Maybe that gave you the wrong impression, i like this album a lot, but if Mastodon is just a band you've heard or heard of in passing, you could totally hate this album. I do know what i just listened to, and it's an experience. Not a "hey you should really check out this band Mastodon" kind of experience, but more a "words fail me" kind of experience. 

You don't read more than 2 of my reviews expecting to hear me describe what the songs are like or why you should buy it and argue with me, you read them because i am basically the only person on earth describing my listening experience in real time. I took the liberty of just enjoying it in its entirety first, and there is a lot to unpack. 

For starters, this is Mastodon's best album since Crack The Skye. Technically i would argue that Cold Dark Place actually deserves that award, but i'll plot it out so you see why i'll let this win and let the other merely be my opinion. 

Once More 'Round The Sun is a fantastic album, but it has some less than inspired cliche hackwork on the inside. Emporer of Sand is good, but you always have to include the caveat that it's "stripped down, minimalist Mastodon for people who already like Mastodon." Cold Dark Place is an EP comprising leftover tracks from Crack The Skye and Once More 'Round The Sun, i can't argue that it's not. Hushed and Grim is the first actual new music from Mastodon in 5 years. Trump hadn't even started acting like any kind of President at all when Emporer of Sand came out, he was still acting like the whole thing was a twitter joke he wasn't sure he actually wanted to keep playing. 

In 2018 their friend and manager Nick John died from cancer. We all lived through the 2020/2021 shitstorm, and in essence this is Mastodon's quarantine album. For the first time in 20 years it does not feature a Scott Kelly guest vocal appearance, and that's because as we all learned in 2022 he had been secretly terrorizing and psychologically abusing his wife and children for years, so he goes in the dumpster with all the other garbage and we feel bad for the other band members of Neurosis who have had their lives' work flushed down the toilet by association. Exponentially worse than whatever Dave #2 did with that consenting adult lady. 

Mastodon has never been shy about tackling death and writing songs about it, but Hushed and Grim sounds like this time it actually fractured something in their collective psyches. The SQUIRREL! appears rabid, there's Blues and borderline Country in Brent's guitar work, i don't even want to try to guess what's going on with Troy's new attempt at a singing voice (he does normal Troy howls and growls too, but this new thing is bizarre). Some people swear you don't notice the weird time signatures and herky-jerky riffs that trip over their own shoelaces, but no, yeah, some of the tracks sound intentionally messed up and barely keeping it together. To sum up, while it is obviously and recognizably Mastodon, they're covering a whole lot of new and experimental territory on Hushed and Grim. 

The guitar solos on this actual Double LP are not happy fun time affairs, they're full out wailing at the moon hissy fits, one of them contributed by Kim Thayil. There is a lot of synth work here as well, and they might have legitimately invented a couple new and terrifying chords. Hushed and Grim, as in an eerily awkward silence proceeding to a seriously pessimistic prognosis. I will definitely give you this is a unique addition to the Mastodon discography, but it is not an album intended to make new friends with random strangers who haven't rubbed their faces against the sandpapery walls of reality a time or 7. This is an "i feel it in my bones" kind of album. You could mistakenly walk away thinking "i don't get it." I think i get it, it's desperately trying to do everything in a manic "before it's too late" kind of way. It's not an album from a perspective of perseverance, rather it's an album of inevitability. This album is heavy, and probably needs a dozen more listens to fully internalize.