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.

Mastodon Simplify the Formula

With news and speculation surrounding Opeth's forthcoming album, Christmas struck again this week with news of sludge/prog-metal behemoths Mastodon's new album, also due sometime this Autumn. The album has been christened The Hunter and in an interview with the Terrorizer website, the band hinted that this was a reference to the death of bandmember Brent Hinds' brother, himself a hunter, last year.

Heritage

Ever since I heard for myself their outstanding 2005 album Ghost Reveries, I have been a keen fanatic of Opeth's music. To the uninitiated, Opeth are primarily a progressive metal band, but the band cannot really be pinned down pinned down by simply one genre. Taking in all elements of classic rock, jazz, death metal and more, the Swede's songs are typically mammoth recordings, really demanding your full attention to appreciate the different elements that combine and conflict to marvellous effect. As my girlfriend helpfully pointed out to me, their logo is a perfect advertisement for this struggle of life and death - the 'O' of their name is transformed into a beautiful rose, but a second look reveals that it is infested with insects, spreading corruption and decay. At least, that's how we see it. But it is this fearless capacity to blend so many divergent styles of music that attracts so many different kinds of people to Opeth's music - people who would normally shy away from death metal altogether.

Twitter and Spotify Reviews

In a blog post back in November I mentioned I had signed myself up to both Twitter and Spotify. It's been about 6 months now so I thought I'd give my feedback on my experiences with both here. Both are already well-established online fixtures so I am interested in recording my experiences and thoughts about them. 

To be honest, I was expecting to get along with both of them a lot more than I did.