this is where i disagree. i started with blood mountain as the first full disc i checked out. i hear a fair amount of growth and diversification without shit sucking between albums while still maintaining to touch on the elephant man on every disc and not making it sound tacked on. (although i haven't heard crack the skye yet).

can't believe you're passing judgement on mastodon without having heard 'leviathan'.

I think when it comes to Mastodon I liked them the best when they released Remission. Leviathan and Blood Mountain were awesome as well, but Crack the Skye is them taking a turn for the worse. I respect that they change their sound a lot and they've done it successfully so far, IMO until they released Crack the Skye. The album has its moments but hopefully they won't keep making music in that style.

Classic!


Who you gonna call?



Of course, Superman and Spiderman are going WTF?

Music, like the economy, is cyclical. We go through great periods of music. And stretches of bad music. Another good stretch will come around.

Amen.

How would you see this in recent history? When was the last good stretch? It seems to me like the sixties, seventees and eightees had more of them than the last two decades.

yeah i still haven't heard that album, i keep hearing less than positive feedback.

at the same time though i think the fact that they didn't release three iterations of 'remission' as their overall 'career debut' makes it easier for the audience to handle their stylistic changes and eliminates cries of 'sellout!' when the changes happen.

Perhaps he meant that the 60s, 70s and 80s together were the last good stretch, and we have for 20 years now been in a bad one. Not necessarily agreeing with that, just putting forth one interpretation of what he said.

Well you can't really recognize a cycle based on two episodes. Then you'd have to go further back and wonder what the second last good stretch was, which then must be a really long time ago.

I see it as everything has always been that way, however, here's an example.

In the 50's, music became all about fun, girls and boys relationships, and was light hearted and party friendly, so it was good but shallow, then in the 60's it became cool to be meaningful and political, and music made just for fun was shallow and unhip, towards the end of the 60's people became sick of this and disco emerged and music became fun and shallow again (I'm talking mainstream here too, what the majority was doing), but toward the mid 70's we had yet another backlash and complex poetic music took over, which was then overrun but the fun shallow 80's pop and metal that came after that, which was then overrun by the dark, meaningful grunge scene.

All this change and frustration brought music to new heights, boredom with the current breeds something new. But after the late 90's, nothing has really changed, though you can see all the signs of people wanting it to, so someone from the underground will probably become the mainstream, and we'll see it change again.