Review Summary: Although musically familiar, this is the most expressive Mastodon have ever sounded.
Mastodon has continuously grappled with mortality throughout their 17-year career. While each of their past six albums features a different perception of deathly trials, the Georgian quartet has always applied their own personal accounts of mortality into their music. Each record has also reflected a time of trauma in the life of at least one of the band members and their seventh album,
“Emperor of Sand”, observes Mastodon revealing themselves more so than ever. Depressingly, like most people on the planet, the band members have all recently lost someone close to cancer, which ultimately serves as the concept behind the album.
As the first conceptually-based album since 2009,
“Emperor of Sand” therapeutically allows Mastodon to illustrate their struggles of loss and mortality in a cinematic way by pouring their experiences into a story detailing a character who is doomed to die. “Sultan’s Curse” establishes the endless landscape of a desert’s scorching sand through granular riffs, luminous clean vocals and radiant solos where it is learned that the protagonist has received a death sentence. However, the attitude of the character changes immediately in the subsequent track, “Show Yourself”. Presenting infectious lyrics, this song is noticeably more upbeat than the rest of the album’s content (or even any Mastodon song for that matter) since the character has seemingly avoided his death sentence. There’s an energetic sense of urgency in Bill Kelliher’s guitars as the hero escapes captivity, but it’s not a sense of panic; it’s hope.
Wandering towards an unreachable horizon in search of water and food through the dry, cracking terrain with the merciless rays of sunlight beating down on his scarred skin, splitting lips and drying the mouth, the protagonist’s moods begin to contort between tranquillity and insanity. Sometimes, these emotions rise in harsh, sporadic outbursts. At first, “Steambreather” features some doleful riffs that portray a lethargic mood but they twist and turn into an intense maddening rhythm as the character’s existence is questioned with lyrics repeatedly asking “I wonder who I am?” Additionally, "Andromeda" is the closest Mastodon comes to their earlier days when Troy Sanders incorporates a vicious, snarling voice above distorted and crackled riffs. Yet, in the more reflective moments of the album, the shifting moods are more subtly undertaken to amplify the sincerity of Mastodon’s familiarity with cancer. Brent Hinds’ slaloming grooves delicately shrink to give way to Sanders’ gentle signing during ‘Precious Stones’ and Brann Dailor’s choruses soar in the spiralling ‘Word to the Wise’ and the spacey "Roots Remain" with personal ardour.
“Emperor of Sand” concludes with Mastodon’s perception of the afterlife in two stages. Firstly, "Scorpion Breath" features Neurosis’ Scott Kelly, whose anchoring vocals make the character’s tragic death a traumatic and excruciating event. Conversely, "Jaguar God" details the transitional phase between death and resurrection. Serene acoustics, luscious vocals and drifting melodies evoke that the character is finally at peace, but death is just another part of the journey and the protagonist’s journey is not complete yet. The track breaks into gazing synth as the character is resurrected into the body of a jaguar and bounds off into the desert during an adrenalized rhythm.
Although Mastodon’s seventh album is musically undifferentiated to anything they’ve done before, symbolising stages of cancer as a journey through a desert-like setting was a stroke of genius. The album itself is a timeline of the cancer process, beginning with the inescapable curse, leading to the brief moments of optimism, undergoing the effects of chemo attempting to burn it away, aimlessly reflecting on life and finally, amiably facing death. Life is only the beginning; death is not the end. Don’t waste your time; don’t let it slip away from you.
