Prog Metal Roundup

Metal gets real complicated. It's probably because drama is an essential quality of metal that so many bands tend to draw their songs out to epic lengths and even link them together with often hilariously fantastical story lines.

Mastodon's new album Crack the Skye has long songs and a story line, though I wouldn't necessarily say it's hilarious. This album is the major label debut of a band that has done really well on independent labels, and it's dead serious. I'm just not entirely sure what it's so serious about. Astral projection is definitely in there, and Rasputin. Maybe the bizarre story line is just a justification for the totally awesome album art depicting spirit warriors and ghost bears you can see above. And that's just fine with me.

Mastodon can definitely play them some metal. Their level of musicianship seems to be very high, but they are still comfortable laying down some thick ass power chords when it's called for. They sound better screaming than singing, but they're sufficiently passionate to pull off the more melodic bits. I think the best attribute of Crack the Skye is that although long, the songs don't stray too far into the outer limits. There's one song that has a weird psych bridge, but they don't get nuts and put weird psych bridges into every song. They do it once, and satisfied with a mind melting interlude well crafted, they call it a day and flesh the other songs out with other little touches.

This was probably the key to keeping this album down to a relatively trim fifty minutes. There's no fat present, no forgettable acoustic ditties that fall between the big rocking tracks, just keepers. At the same time, the tracks all sound layered and huge (this album was produced by the guy who did all the Pearl Jam album from Vs to when they got completely forgettable) with really tasty metal guitar tones. Well done.



Hammers of Misfortune are a very different band, and a lot harder to pigeonhole than Mastodon. Mastodon are rockers at heart, but the Hammers are quite a bit more ambitious while working with significantly less resources. Their new(ish) double album Fields/Church of Broken Glass is a two-in-one concept album, two different albums recorded and released at one time, mostly because of constraints on recording budget, or so I gather. Fields is apparently some kind of historical meditation on conflict between aristocracy and peasantry, while Church seems to be about post-industrial decay.

The Hammers have a very different sound than Mastodon. Though I'm not a metal expert, it's sounds somewhere between power metal (no distortion pedals allowed, just over-driven amps) and seventies prog rock ala Yes. When everything is working right, it sounds pretty good, but I can't help but feel that it would have benefited from a better recording. Given that the sound is pretty live (not a lot of overdubs) the individual instruments aren't always captured clearly enough to lend the songs the necessary weight, or to put it another way, rocking-ness.

Another issue is the singing. The mastermind and songwriter of Hammers doesn't do the singing, he farms it out to dude(ette)s who have fairly impressive chops. But the result sounds pretty theatrical, which is not something that I'm very used to in metal. People love Ozzy so much because he sang about Iron Man like some dude he knew. He didn't let the fact that he was singing about a science fiction hero who saved the human race in the future throw him off his game or block up his passion, he may as well have been singing about an alcoholic panhandler that he passed on the street every day. You definitely don't get that kind of personal commitment to the subject matter on these records, the singing is a little more in the realm of show tunes. Everything is telegraphed and really clearly enunciated. But there are plenty of good tunes and interesting images here if it sounds like your kind of thing.