Band:	Mastodon
Album:	The Hunter
Style:	Progressive stoner metal
Release date:	September 2011

01. Black Tongue
02. Curl Of The Burl
03. Blasteroid
04. Stargasm
05. Octopus Has No Friends
06. All The Heavy Lifting
07. The Hunter
08. Dry Bone Valley
09. Thickening
10. Creature Lives
11. Spectrelight
12. Bedazzled Fingernails
13. The Sparrow
14. The Ruiner [limited-edition bonus]
15. Deathbound [limited-edition bonus]

With The Hunter, Mastodon are out of their element. Or rather out of elements. Fortunately, after releasing albums loosely themed about fire, water, earth, and air, the Georgia quartet ignored Metalstormers' pleas for a Captain Planet album to tie it all together.

So as for the new album, the immediate TL;DR is this: If you were expecting Leviathan 2.0 or Remission MMXII, you'll likely be disappointed. If you were cool with Crack The Skye, it's a safe bet you will enjoy this one as well.

The band continues with the direction taken in CTS, which is to say less with the sludged-up noisecore or whatever, and more with the 70's prog loving alternative rock/metal approach. While less METAL! than their first few albums - this means almost entirely clean vocals and dialing the distortion down - these guys are all extremely talented musicians capable of crafting some awesome songs that can be both complex and catchy. Just because they toned it down doesn't mean they dumbed it down.

Tracks like "Curl Of The Burl", "Dry Bone Valley", and "Blasteroid" are upbeat and tuneful enough that you'll find yourself singing along? yet still have musical complexities to give them depth and keep you intrigued.

In addition to those rockin' tunes, the band changes up with "Stargasm" and the title track which capture some of the same hypnotic style as Skye? hell, "The Hunter" features a riff which harkens back to "The Czar: The Usurper" on their last release.

Their penchant for the weird goes well beyond silly-sounding song titles as well? "The Creature Live" starts off with some Whovian-Pink Floyd circa 1970 trippy synthesizers (and chuckles) before going into a sad, lighter (smartphone) hoisting ditty about a swamp creature who, like the Octopus, seems to have no friends aside from the singer/narrator, backed by a choir to enhance the sorrow? woe is us.

The mood gets a nice 180 immediately after the sad tale and those craving their older works do get tossed a bone in form of "Spectrelight" - a pummeling tune that will have you waving a harpoon around like the good old white whale chasing days of Leviathan.

The band seems to embrace the more open concept and just bounce, stylistically, all over the place across the album. This album is chock full of songs that are ripe for radio play? but only if your zip code has a really cool station.

Well, and they can somehow get past Brent Hinds snarling "I wanna drink some fucking blood/I wanna break some fucking glass!"