Heavy Song of the Week is a feature on Heavy Consequence breaking down the top metal, punk, and hard rock tracks you need to hear every Friday. This week, we highlight the new album track “Barbarian’s Blood” from Mastodon.
It’s with vicious drums that Mastodon opens their newest album Marrow Deep, bringing to mind a more savage variant on the ripping drums that opened Blood Mountain 20 years ago. That sense of mythic murk and magical heavy metal of the Blood Mountain era continues across the build of the song toward its first eruptive chorus. The hunger of their third studio album, the one that followed their breakthrough in Leviathan, their first on a major label, the one that would determine whether they had a future or not, is felt again here. You can feel the weight they bear. They have to honor a fallen brother as much as they have to defend their ability to continue to exist, to find vitality in death. The eruptive force here is akin to Crack the Skye, an album likewise born out of explicit grief and the loss of a sibling. Similarly, we see a marked transformation on “Barbarian’s Blood.”
The transformation here, however, is more complete and all-encompassing. Rather than signaling a shift in their sound toward something, “Barbarian’s Blood” feels like a total compendium of who they have been. There is a beatdown riff closer to Call of the Mastodon or Remission, tight thrashy riffs from Leviathan, the wider rich atmospheres of their previous two records, and all capped by a keyboard solo from their new official keyboard player that feels genuinely new. “Barbarian’s Blood” is a statement, proof the band can still do every last single thing you’ve ever heard them do, do them well, and have yet more in the tank that we’ve never seen. It’s the perfect opener not just to a new album but a new era of the band and one of many reasons Marrow Deep is likely to go down as being just as important as those magical first four albums of theirs. It’s our Heavy Song of the Week.
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Honorable Mentions
Gorod – “Signs”
Looking at this as a progressive death metal song misrepresents it more than a bit. While the vocals certainly live in that space between extreme metal and hardcore that a lot of great bands draw from, the music is much closer to the prog metal of a band like Dream Theater or Protest the Hero. The riffs zig and zag in unexpected ways, the drums live in the realm of exciting off-beat accents and syncopation more than laying a backbeat, and the twin guitars play countermelodies that weave a much more robust sonic picture than cliched twin leads or mere drop tuned chugging. There is an Opethian sense of grandeur matched by gnarly riffs that absolutely beg you to stankface and head bang to the odd rhythms. Intellectual framing fails; this song is sick, straight up.
Lugubrious Garment – “Profaned Fountain of Leaden Waters”
What a wild mixture of elements. The opening tricks you into thinking what’s to come is a vicious black metal ripper. Then, the death metal riffs come in, only to quickly be subsumed into a straight-up Mastodon groove. There are lines delivered in pure Serj Tankian worship, proggy swells and countermelodies, and punky D-beat mayhem. This is an encyclopedia of heavy music that cuts across such a wide spectrum that it betrays a real love rather than a desire to appear cool which in turn makes it very cool. The utter charisma of the performance is infectious, feeling more like being present in a jam room or a punk basement show where a band achieves the flowstate, hopping riff to riff seemingly at random but with every choice just being right. It’s perfect.
Shy, Low – “Purity Spiral”
Digging through singles can sometimes be dire work. That’s what makes encountering something like “Purity Spiral” so special. Way back when, post-metal was often called “atmospheric sludge,” alluding the Neurosis-derived heft to the material. While for many bands, that element wore away to be replaced by increasingly banal post-rock elements, Shy, Low have remained in tight contact with that essential emotional brutality. You can practical hear the bellowed vocals that would over this if only they had a singer, especially given its rather shapely composition despite being over 9 minutes long. It’s a piece that follows the dictum of emotionality rather than a pre-ordained verse/chorus structure, which makes those recurrent elements feel well-earned rather than forced. This is just frankly an incredible piece of music that has placed a band I didn’t know existed well onto my map.
