Tupan I have a problem with overlong albums. It’s rare for a band to come with more than 50 minutes of good music in each release. In the vinyl era, the artists were forced to choose the best material to fill an album, and the “fat” would be used as B-sides or never be recorded at all. When CD arrived, many bands tried to put many songs as possible in their albums, and frankly, that was a unnecessary move by most…

Anyways, here we are, with Hushed and Grim, the most recent release from the prog/sludge band Mastodon. A double album with some great tracks (Pain and Anchor, More Than I Could Chew, Gobblers of Dregs, Gigantium) and many not so great songs that I don’t even remember the name. This is a more mid-tempoed album, with some furious and fast moments scattered through the songs. I would like to hear more faster tracks, to add a bit more of variation. And surely this album would benefit from some editing – pick the best music and put the rest in an EP or in the aforementioned B-sides.

Mastodon never made a bad album, but their last great release (and masterpiece) was Crack The Skye. I still recommend this one, but it’s a tiring listening.

Kev Rowland I didn’t hear Mastodon’t debut album, ‘Remission’, when it was released back in 2002, but did come across ‘Leviathan’ a few years later and have followed their career with interest since then. Released in 2021, ‘Hushed and Grim’ was their eighth studio album and their first in four years, following on from ‘Emperor of Sand’ where I said they were moving into a lighter direction. That has happened again with this release, except this time they have taken it too far and it is hard for me to associate this release with the mighty behemoth they used to be.

Frustratingly, drummer Brann Dailor is having one of his finest times behind the kit, always pushing hard with loads of fills and changes in rhythm and attack, but for the most part the guys in front of him are not doing the same. There are times when they show just what they are made of, but too many when they just sit back, with “Sickle and Peace” being a case in point with some fine guitars and crunch at times, but way too much cleverness and not enough volume at others. This is also a very long album (86 minutes) and in that sense it reminds me of some of The Flower Kings’ releases in that some judicious pruning and editing might well have been in order as much of this album just washed over me.

There are times when an artist can keep moving and eventually leave some of their fans behind, and I must admit this is pretty close for me, yet there are times when they really show what they are capable of (such as on “More than I Could Chew”) so I live in hope that the next one will be better.

UMUR "Hushed and Grim" is the 8th full-length studio album by US progresive/sludge/heavy metal act Mastodon. The album was released through Reprise Records in October 2021. It´s the successor to "Emperor of Sand" from 2017 and it´s the band´s first double album (although such a description almost doesn´t make sense anymore in these digital release times), featuring no less than 15 tracks and a total playing time of 86:17 minutes. It´s a lot of material and probably a result of the long recording and touring break caused by the COVID-19 pandemic lockdown. They wouldn´t be the first act to have been extra creative during those special circumstances.

"Hushed and Grim" features a progressive metal sound that is unmistakably the sound of Mastodon (although at its least heavy it´s closer to alternative rock than metal). The busy, organic, and innovative drumming, the distinct sounding guitar riffs (lots of open string chords), and the vocal style. Mastodon used to play a far more aggressive and technically challenging progressive sludge metal style, but the last many albums have featured a more accessible, melodic, and sometimes even laid back style of music. Mastodon can still deliver the occassionally harder edged, heavy, and raw section, but it´s almost always accompanied by a memorable melodic chorus, a mellow psychadelic tinged section, or an adventourus progressive structured part. The fact that the album features lead vocals by three of the four members (and backing vocals by guitarist Bill Kelliher), makes the vocal part of the album relatively varied. While it´s not the dominant vocal style anymore, there at still some pretty raw vocals on the album, but the vocals are often more mellow, melodic, and laid back in nature.

Pick any individual track from "Hushed and Grim", and you´ll find that any track you pick is a quality composition, but to my ears 15 tracks and a total playing time of 86:17 minutes are an excess of material and playing time, and the album does overstay its welcome when listened to in one sitting. The album is a quality product in every other way, featuring brilliant musical performances, adventurous songwriting, and a powerful and detailed sound production, so other than the fact that Mastodon should probably have shown restraint and culled a few tracks from the album, "Hushed and Grim" is still an enjoyable listen and a 3.5 star (70%) rating is deserved.

lukretion US prog metal big shots Mastodon just released their eight LP, a nearly 90-minute double-album whammy titled Hushed and Grim. I have been following the band since their 2009 breakthrough Crack the Skye and I enjoyed all releases since then, so my anticipation for the new album, that had been described as darker and more progressive than anything before, was high. Alas, my expectations were quickly disappointed after I gave the new record a couple of spins. After sitting with it for over a week, I can confidently say that Hushed and Grim is a strong contender for my personal “biggest let-down of 2021”, perhaps only second to Steven Wilson’s The Future Bites. So what went wrong?

In an interview to UK magazine PROG, drummer Brann Dailor introduced the album by saying: “We could only get it down to 15 songs. We had multiple listens at my house and those 15 songs just felt like they needed to be together. To whittle it down to 55 minutes, our usual sweet spot, we would have had to get rid of six or seven songs and it wasn’t happening.”. And that, ladies and gentlemen, is the mother of all problems with this album. The band and renowned producer David Bottrill (Peter Gabriel, King Crimson, Tool) decided to take an “everything goes” and “more and more” approach to songwriting and album production, which on the surface may seem to push the “progressive” ambitions of Mastodon’ music, but it ultimately greatly harms its listenability.

The main problems of the album for me are direction and consistency. This album does not have either. Its 15 tracks move back and forth between dark alternative rock/metal, spacey progressive metal and remnants of the more sludgy and metallic sound from the band’s origins, without deciding which sonic identity to give to the music. Do not get me wrong, I love albums that incorporate a set of diverse influences into the sound. But this requires careful arrangements to balance the various ingredients into the music. Here the driving approach seems to have been to just let the different influences surface at different points of a song, or in different songs, without worrying too much about how these may flow into one another. The end result is a collection of songs that are yes diverse, but also feel somewhat schizophrenic and directionless, moving back and forth between the various styles without managing to settle on a sensible compromise or achieving a satisfying amalgam. In other words, the album stutters rather than flowing gracefully, and this makes for a rather uncomfortable and frustrating listening experience.

There’s plenty of examples of this across the 15 songs of the album. “Pain with an Anchor” is an interesting opener, introducing influences from modern dark rock/metal bands like Katatonia or A Perfect Circle, that I would not have expected to hear on a Mastodon album, but the following track “The Crux” immediately reverts expectations, harking back towards the heavier and spacey metallic sounds of Once More 'Round the Sun. The album seems to settle on this groove for a couple of tracks, before “The Beast” confusingly throws in some incongruous bluesy sections to bookend what is otherwise a fairly standard piece of atmospheric progressive metal. Meanwhile “Skeleton of Splendor” and the single “Teardrinker” return to the mellow alternative vibes of the opening track, before “Pushing the Tides” veers again towards a heavier sound. The second disc pretty much continues in this ambivalent vein, almost as if Mastodon were undecided between embracing the new alternative rock/metal sound and sticking with their more traditional heavy sound.

While flow is a characteristic that I find very important in a full-length album, I could have forgiven the album’s deficiency in this department if Hushed and Grim were consistently high quality across its 15 songs. Alas, it is not. The album is crammed with mediocre material that should have absolutely been filtered out. “The Crux”, “More than I Could Chew” (which, come to think about it, is a pretty accurate description of how I feel about this record), “The Beast”, “Pushing the Tides”, “Savage Lands”, “Eyes of Serpents” are all pretty subpar songs that really do not add much to Mastodon’s extant discography, sounding like a re-hashed version of their earlier material. The frustrating thing is that the filler material severely dilutes the impact that strong tracks like “Pain with an Anchor”, “Skeleton of Splendor”, “Teardrinker”, “Peace and Tranquillity” and “Gobblers of Dregs” could have made on the listener. All these songs are interesting, some even exciting, but it is excruciating to have to wade through almost an hour of average material to get to listen to the good bits of the album.

Mastodon are top notch musicians and the playing throughout Hushed and Grim casts no doubt on this, from Brann Dailor’s frenzied drumming to Brent Hinds’ and Bill Kelliher’s dazzling guitar playing, the album brims with excellent musicianship. Where Hushed and Grim falls considerably short, however, is in the songwriting and arrangement department. Ultimately, the combo of lack of direction and watered down tracklist was definitely a killjoy for me and I do not see myself returning to this record anytime soon. I nevertheless choose to believe that this is just a blip in Mastodon’s impressive discography and I remain hopeful and looking forward to the band’s next move.

[Originally written for The Metal Observer]

ssmarcus It seemed like not so long ago that progressive metal fans were lamenting Mastodon’s pivot away from prog-inspired sludge metal and into a more commercially viable riff-happy direction. While 2018’s Emperor of Sand signaled a minor but welcomed course correction for the group, Mastodon’s latest effort, Hushed and Grim, is nothing short of a triumphant return to form, perhaps in even greater measure that any time before in the band’s legendary career.

I’ll admit that upon learning Hushed and Grim was a double record spanning almost 90 minutes, I assumed it was going to be yet another covid-lockdown-inspired slog; an under cooked serving by another artist bored and unsure of what to do with themselves with all their new-found time. Bucking this trend, Mastodon have managed to utilize the time to commit every ounce of creative and pent-up emotional energy they could muster to crafting what is an album that is every bit as heavy, psychedelic, technical, experimental, and proggy as anything else they have ever done in their career. While it might be tough to justify a 90-minute run time, it is truly remarkable just how every track has at least something about it to admire.

The record’s only real flaw is the muddy mix that tends to drown out the finer textures of the melodies and riffs. This gets particularly upsetting when comparing the mix to the crisp clean gloss of their previous effort. But putting that flaw aside, Hushed & Grim forces even casual Mastodon fans like myself to come to one inescapable conclusion: this band is simply incapable of making a bad album. And whether you fancy the progressive greatness Crack the Skye or the raw but subtly ambitious onslaught of Leviathan, I think you’ll find Hushed & Grim a worthy contribution to the Mastodon discography.