Mastodon Album Art and Teaser + Opeth news!

It's got three jaws and eight ears - are you surprised?

Good news for Mastodon fans - the album art for the forthcoming album The Hunter has been revealed and it's just as head-fuckingly awesome as all of the other offerings over the past decade.
As an artist (yes, I do a lot of drawing too, although these days only when the pigs fly over the blue moon) I always used to find Mastodon's album covers and the music to be one of the biggest influences on my drawing style - their obsession with subjects on a grand scale, from their own own namesake to the monstrous White Whale of Moby Dick, enormous animated trees, time travel and more, they've never been short on ideas in their records that allow your mind to wander down all kinds of paths. Coupled with a brand-new trailer for the album released last week, featuring the track 'Black Tongue', it seems as though The Hunter will be treading the same mythical territory that we've come to know and love:

This sounds to me somewhere in between Blood Mountain and Crack the Skye - the awesome guitar harmonies and the fast-paced rythmn strikes me as the former, whereas the strange, almost ethereal effect on the vocals reminds me of the latter ('Ghost of Karelia' anyone?). This pleases me - those two albums really demonstrated how Mastodon can tackle two divergent concepts and still give them that core Mastodon 'feel', so this album could possibly be a fusion of the two; a consolidation of what they've learnt from their musical careers. It's still early days, however, and a one minute trailer just isn't enough to go on. We'll just have to sit on our hands like good boys and girls and wait for more samples!

As for Opeth, I haven't managed to uncover any additional news or information about Heritage that I haven't already divulged. There's a lot of 'leaked' tracks floating around on youtube, but it's impossible to work out what could be fake and what isn't, so for now I'm just going to wait for an offical announcement before making any moves myself. What I do know, however, is that Opeth will be kick-starting their tour to promote Heritage in the UK, and will be playing the O2 Academy in Birmingham on Saturday 12th November. As it's my 24th birthday tomorrow (I know, decrepitude approaches swiftly these days!), my girlfriend has offered to buy us both tickets to see them! This is the same venue that I saw them perform their Watershed tour in 2008, and they were fantastic. Even my girlfriend loved them, and she isn't even a fan of death metal vocalists. The venue itself isn't a favourite of mine, but it's a safe bet that Opeth will have everyone hooked by the end of the night.

And whilst I wait for these two albums and until the gig in November, I have my birthday present to plough through: George R.R.Martin's newest book in the A Song of Ice and Fire series: A Dance With Dragons! I'm already about 200 pages into it, and it's actually better than I was expecting - it's nice to read some characters such as Jon Snow and Bran Stark that haven't been touched upon since the third book was released eleven years ago! I won't divulge any spoilers, but I do hope to give the book a review when it's finished - which will probably be next week at my current pace. Stay tuned!