Mastodon Acoustic Set Live at Atlanta, Georgia Aquarium Concert Review
Reprise Records (2021)
I’m admittedly not too familiar with these chic rednecks’ retail discography (since outside of …Linoleum Knife, which might have been the 2nd side-banginest moment in the Aqua Teen Hunger Force movie, behind its off-color, Blue / Gray Civil War jokes, I’ve tended to change channels / stations / tracks / discs or simply click the X spot on my Mozilla tab a minute or so after some Mastodon song enters my earholes), so I listened—twice, all the way through—to the acoustic set that this DIY four-piece dry-fried inside their hometown’s fish prison to see if it would offer some sort of revelation as to why this band, of all bands, became so popular in the aughts; but my reaction to their music remains the same, whether their distortion pedals are turned on or off:
NO SIR,
I DON’T LIKE IT.
Their overcooked, tightly bound, no space to breathe, tortuously stretched-out “riffs” take on a boatload of bland arpeggios + fast-picked minor-key phrases then shift the starting notes slightly left / slightly right or a little bit up / down the fretboard in wallpaper-esque patterns that become tiresome before even the second repeat, and will make one solutionally suicidal by the third or fourth time around; Tony Iommi, these laddies aren’t.
The effects-drenched, radio-length guitar solos are the most likable part of this live performance, but they’re pegleg short, and will often stop many bars before they could—conjecturely—contemplate charting a path past the typical pentatonic / blues territory that rock ‘n’ roll guitarists have been traversing since the 1960s; one will hear more imagination and ingenuity in ten seconds of an Allan Holdsworth solo than in ten songs-worth of scale runs from Brent Hinds, who sounds like a junior realtor, on paper, but looks like he just lost his CDL last Tuesday from a failed drug test, and later that evening, C’mon man-ned his way into having the Apple-iest of his three cisgender roomates design him a faceless, addressless, self-employed THC webstore, so that he could finally fulfill the dankest of his CBD dreams by going pro in his (and his PBR-swilling buds’) longest-burning passion.
All of Mastodon’s instrument-occupied vocalists—like most of the 1990s’ mumbling & strained grunge / nu metal acts—sing in a way that’s trying to hide the fact none of them actually can sing; there be no HOLY DIVAHs amongst ye.
The drummer’s crashless skin set also makes it impossible for him to hide his complete lack of groove behind any of the genre-usual, ear-bursting barrel-blasts, as he fails to adequately ration his drum sticks’ and leg pedals’ hits, stumbling overboard in a splash of snares and toms, which ripples all throughout these songs’ lined but still circular beats, drowning out the rest of the seasick music with his total failure to understand when a throne-holder should stay off-beat and lifelessly let the surviving crew members talk over his echoing ghost notes. This birch kit nitwit has no idea what a percussive pocket is or where / how to find it; he barely plays any audible fills, showcases a no-more-than-rudimentary rhythmic vocabulary, and just generally sounds like he’s pounding away on autopilot for the entire setlist, to the point that he could’ve been replaced with a wooden metronome and nothing of value would’ve been lost, whilst a treasure chest-worth of empty auditory space would have been gained.
This discordant, slickly produced racket is the definition of moDURn MEHtal:
BUSY, but not dense;
HARSH, but not offensive;
EXOTIC, in the sense that it employs scales which neither originate from African blues nor Western classical traditions, yet structurally, tonally and thematically, it remains so Puritanically rigid, so obedient to and so resolutely centered on meeting each frothing demand of the mainstream Caucasian media’s tax-evading conglomerates and their pissant Anglo American music consumers that it cannot rightfully be called liberating—much less praiseworthy—by anyone but that particular brand of brickwall’d, blabbermouth’d, knuckle-dragging meathead who only listens to rock and metal plus whichever once-popular prog LPs their thrice-divorced dad had lying around in his parents’ attic after he died in some unsolved snorkeling accident off the coast of Kennebunkport (Maine), right as the last of his combed over black hairs were starting to go fully grey, and his pruned oyster-poker had finally lost all of its natural ability to get corpse-hard.
Rude Owls 