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Mastodon Have Enough Songs for Both a “Doom” Album and “Rippers” Album

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The word “doom” has entered the Mastodon lexicon a whole lot in recent months. Drummer Brann Dailor used it to describe new music the band was writing around this time last year, and then again over the summer. Off-hand press quotes are of course to be taken with a grain of salt, but Dailor has now hammered that point home once more in a new interview, giving us reason to believe Mastodon’s next offering will indeed be on the doomier side.

Speaking with Idaho radio station 100.3 The X Rocks, Dailor said the band have about 30 songs written for their next album and are having difficulty paring those down to just 12 to make the final cut. When asked if the band knows immediately which ones are keepers, he again brought “doom” into the conversation, saying the band could easily separate what they’ve written into two separate albums, one of “doom” tracks and one full of faster “rippers:”

“No – we don’t know [how to choose], that’s the problem. We need an outsider, an outside entity to come in that we trust to say, ‘These are the songs!’ But that’s probably not going to happen. So it’s going to be up to us to put our big boy pants on and make a decision.

“But there are a few different ways that we could do things, so we are just sort of debating those things like, ‘OK, so we have these all these songs kind of sound like they’re all friends, they all are similar-ish, they sort of have the same vibe, like a more doomy vibe, a more doom side of Mastodon.’

“So we kind of like that idea, it’s kind of cool, we like that, but also there are some rippers that we don’t want to leave out.

“And so we’re kind of discussing whether or not do we want to do a full kind of doom leaning album and then a few months down the road record the rippers and put a ripper album out. I don’t know, so we’re still sort of deciding what and how we want to approach it.”

I, for one, would be whole-heartedly in favor of a full-on Mastodon doom album! The band has already done rippers — as well as prog and even borderline hard rock — but they’ve never truly slowed it down and grooved for an entire collected work. That would jive with what guitarist Bill Kelliher told MetalSucks in a recent chat about the ongoing evolution of the Mastodon sound.

Elsewhere in that same chat, Kelliher detailed the financial strain the band members have been under while quarantined and unable to tour, revealing they have gone on unemployment.

Mastodon are set to enter the studio this month at their very own, new recording facility.

[via Ultimate Guitar]

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