Our inbox blew up with links to the new Mastodon album cover last night, but as far as I can tell MS artist Rodney Githens was the first to break the news to the world on his brand new site MetalBandArt.com. Nice work on the scoop!

The first thing you’ll notice is that the artwork is stylistically completely different from all of Mastodon’s past album covers, and that’s because it wasn’t done by Paul Romano. Romano drew all four of Mastodon’s previous covers, including some associated singles and special releases along the way if I’m not mistaken… so why the switch? Perhaps the Mastodudes just decided it was time for a change. Or perhaps this album is so different from past Mastodon albums that it warranted a switch in artwork styles; DUN DUN DUN!!!

MetalBandArt.com tells us that the cover for The Hunter was done by AJ Fosik, whose work recently appeared on the cover of Hi-Fructose Magazine. I’d really like to know more about the process for this cover and how Mastodon decided to go with Fosik; perhaps we’ll find out more when Rodney interviews Fosik for his site.

-VN

You are reading this on Wednesday morning (or maybe some other time, depending on various circumstances), but I am writing it on Tuesday night. And as I write it, I am about halfway through listening to Hate Eternal’s new album, Phoenix Amongst the Ashes, for the first time.

And it is glorious.

Click to read more…

Before there were blogs there were these things called magazines, and the only metal magazine we still get excited about reading every month is Decibel. Here’s managing editor Andrew Bonazelli…

I’m one of those dipshits who has shamefully mumbled, “I kind of liked the first two Korn albums…” in casual conversation. The karmic penalty has been paid frequently over the last 15 years, from the time a 5’1” girl punched me in the dick during “Faget” at the Cleveland Odeon to every time I have to endure someone trumpeting that they were raised on Morrisound death and never listened to that “poser shit.” The latter of which being just so fucking annoying — the first band (or “band”) everyone got into was either a) something nightmarish your folks played every day, like the Eagles, b) some variation of a boy band, or c) GN’R, which is the most realistic best-case scenario.

Anyway, Korn and Limp Bizkit are the focus of an exceptionally well-written ongoing Onion AV Club series called “Whatever Happened to Alternative Nation,” and just seeing that pic of Jonathan Davis and Fred Durst under their umbrella triggers many still-unreconciled memories for perhaps a few of you guys, and quite a few Decibel staffers. Shane Mehling is among the latter — if “All in the Family” were actually available in a karaoke book, I have no doubt that we could perform it without looking at the screen once. He doesn’t just own up to this on the Deciblog, but even serves up a super classy yearbook photo cementing the sickness. Luckily, this paean to idiocy was preceded by Adrien Begrand’s typically sharp/mercifully not novel-length Justify Your Shitty Taste on Iron Maiden’s The X Factor!, a lifetime contender for most disquieting, yet not even close to cool album cover. Shit, it must be 1995 week on our blog, because evidently Chris Dick just let Dez Fafara write 550 words about, uh, redheads.

We’ll end on a much radder note. If you snap up a dB subscription by Monday at 5pm, we’ll throw you a Valentine’s Day boner — an exclusive, downloadable printable Valentine’s Day by the great extreme cover artist Paul Romano (Mastodon, Hate Eternal, Withered, other highly shitty bands, although a plenty of bands are highly shitty compared to those three).

-AB

You can buy the March 2011 issue of Decibel here, or get a full subscription to get down with the sickness each and every month.

Yesterday Vince speculated that there may be new Mastodon music in the trailer for the forthcoming video game Splatterhouse. Then we got an e-mail last night from composer Howard Drossin, who explained all:

“The music featured is not by Mastodon. It’s mine. I’m the composer on the game. I really appreciate that you thought it might be Mastodon. They are a big inspiration and I respect them enormously. I post the trailer on my blog as well if you’re interested.”

Howard also contributed music to the recent Afro Samurai video game, and from what I can tell from our brief e-mail exchange, he’s a very chill, humble dude. Be sure to check out his website. And thanks for setting us straight, Howard!

After the jump, more Mastodonews.

Click to read more…

If you’re not familiar with Continuum’s 33 1/3 book series, you should be. Each entry is written by a different music critic and/or journalist, and each one is devoted to the study of a single, seminal album. There’s a wide range of types of music covered by the series – everything from the Beastie Boys to The Velvet Underground – but metal hass, up ’til now, been criminally unrepresented. There are entries for albums by Guns N’ Roses and Nine Inch Nails, but those aren’t metal bands in the strictest sense and, obviously, both groups have been wholly accepted by the mainstream; there was a book covering Sabbath’s Master of Reality recently, but, weird though it may be, at this point Sabbath are pretty much as accepted and unrebellious a metal band as we’re likely to get.

So D.X. Ferris’ recently release tome on Slayer’s Reign in Blood is the series’ first honest to God (or honest to Satan?) book covering a metal album. And it’s an AWESOME read – fascinating, intelligent, informative and insightful, you’re likely to blow through it record time, and then feel depressed as you realize you’ve reached the last page. Ferris not only takes a critical look at the album, making astute observations and pointing out little musical nooks and crannies you might have never noticed even after your gazillionth spin of the classic record, but he also managed to interview everyone and anyone who was involved with the album – from the band members themselves to producer Rick Rubin to engineer Andy Wallace to cover artist Larry Carroll and a few hundred other people I’m forgetting about – as well as loads and loads of musicians and artists who are fans of the album (Henry Rollins, Tori Amos, Gary Holt, and Paul Romano among them).

After I wrote this blog about Slayer and their continuing relevance in the metal world back in June, Ferris actually e-mailed me basically just to say “thanks” for the shout-out to his book. I asked him if I could shoot him some interview questions, and luckily for us, he agreed. After the jump, read what Ferris had to say about the process of putting the book together, things he learned about both Slayer and Reign in Blood while working on the book, and the state of Slayer today.

Click to read more…

I understand that with the physical CDs, records, whatever quickly going the way of the dodo, album art is most likely seeing its end of days, too. Still, if you went to all the trouble of hiring an awesome artist like Paul Romano to do your album art, wouldn’t you first show it to fans in a size larger than this?

Anyway, if I squint real hard, it looks pretty cool. Guess I’ll have to wait ’til the album comes out to know for sure.

-AR