Crack the Skye-Mastodon

I have a beef with “nu-metal”. For me metal was always big, scary and complex. Songs shouldn’t be less than 5 minutes, the bass and drums ought to evoke Satan hammering on your door and the lyrics should soar effortlessly above the rest, only met on occasion by screeching solos every 3 minutes. And under no circumstance must anyone even attempt to be “gangsta”.  In short I’m a devout follower of the Sabbath and Metallica models.

The problem with this is it can get boring, you cover the same ground. For this reason I forgive the music industry for its two decades of catchy chorus and grown men in dress up. Mastodon blew this situation away however on Crack the Skye. Variety is on full show here; “Oblivion” starts with a haunting, spacey synth intro. “Divinations” kicks off with rumbling banjo. Single tracks morph and change direction frequently.

The real impressive feat though is how good everyone is. The vocals are spot on, constant melodies; I still don’t know who exactly was on lead for this album. The two guitars fuzz and dance, the bass skips here and there, on the aforementioned “Divinations” all instruments gun it for a mad crescendo, which impossible holds together. Prog comes to mind very much, I’d compare their sound to recent Metallica with Sabbath. This isn’t thrash, Crack the Skye is much more focused on atmosphere and depth than moshing.

The themes have been updated too. Fantasy and the occult has been a metal staple since Zeppelin, todays it’s space and time travel. There is some kind of concept of a time travelling astronaut warning an occult of the Russian revolution or something, but all you really need to know is this is a trip album.

I’d recommend this to even non-metal fans, it’s an excellent example of the genre very much misunderstood by the mainstream. This and the Black Album should atleast be able to convert non-believers to appreciators. 

With Teeth – Nine Inch Nails

NIN are a hell of a band (it’s a bit more complex than that) but they can be pretty hard to get into. Trent Reznor’s style of dark, swirling thumping music is fantastic and doesn’t really have a good comparison (perhaps later Radiohead and Marilyn Manson) but it’s easy to get lost or disinterested before you get into it. The Downward Spiral is certainly the best of his albums, but the intros are almost Pink Floydian in how long and ridiculous they are. Pretty Hate Machine is much more accessible but has a dated quality; some of the effects sound a bit token and cliché and don’t really fit with what the band moved onto later.

With Teeth however is a straight forward, rocking, down and dirty album of squeaks, screams and awesome, awesome drumming. NIN perfected big echoy drums years ago, but Dave Grohl shows up to contribute his talents and the results are fantastic. “The Collector” has a powerful drum intro while “Y’know What You Are?” has some pounding thrash beats powering it forward.

“Only” is as close as NIN ever got to a pop song, with a catchy beat and a beast of a hook; “There is no you there is only me!”. “The Hand That Feeds” is a good place to start too. “Right Where It Belongs” is a hauntingly slow paced moment of quite in the barrage of all mighty noise.

Overall the album is a quite clear about recovering from an addiction but this being NIN this is twisted into a “is everything what it appears to be?” Matrix-esque muddle. It’s not going to shatter your brain cells or anything but it will stay in the back of your mind for quite some time.

With Teeth is a hell of an album and if you like it I strongly recommend digging up his/their other stuff as the quality is pretty consistent. Today Trent is winning Oscars for some stellar soundtracks, check out this collab with Karen O for The Girl With The Dragon Tattoo, it’s pretty damn awesome.

Scars on Broadway- Scars on Broadway

I think the first two tracks on this album perfectly sum the rest up; “Serious” and “Funny”. The best comparison for Scars on Broadway is System of a Down, which figures seeing as 2/5ths of the bands make up come straight from System. That’s not to say they are identical, the liberal politics and good humour have come across intact, but the tone is bouncier and poppier. There is also a greater range of instrumentation, the sounds jumps from thrash to ballad to electro. Daron Malakian (The guy who screams “WAKE UP IT’S PARTY TIME!” on B.Y.O.B, y’know the one i mean) does a fantastic job fronting the band with impressive soaring vocals and is an ample fit for Serj Tankians position.

In party mode Scars rock seriously hard, “They Say” is infectious and catchy while “Chemicals” is a foul mouthed techno marvel that trumps anything SOAD have so far done. On the other hand of the spectrum “3005” is a thoughtful ballad revelling in how the right will finally die out, but still manages to be humouress and happy.

If you like SOAD you’ll find a lot to love with Scars, if you don’t know either than Scars is a brilliant entry to the mad pair and is well worth checking out.