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Eric McLoed's top 5 music picks for 2004 #5

Heavy metal is over. Done. Dead. Gone.
I know a lot of people still listen to it, but really the genre cannot move anywhere else with out becoming something else. I know lots of other people have said the same things, and loads of people have certainly written about it.
Many people believe metal died when nu-metal took over, but really it never died, and never will. I would also like to say that I don’t really think a true metal band should show any ironic tendencies. Leave that for Tenacious D, and dudes who smirk while doing some virtuosic guitar solos.
Again this brings me to the end of metal and the album Leviathan by Mastodon.
When I listen to this album I feel like I am going Mach 10 in an old ragged train circa 1870 and the landscape has been reduced to a bloody smear. I am serious, the last time I felt this kind of brute against the force of nature I was sitting in a friend’s dorm at Butler University blasting Cannibal Corpse, and I was 19. I am talking supernova kind of riffs. I am talking the first page of metal being Sabbath, the middle is Slayer, and the index is Mastodon .
While Leviathan is totally awesome, it is clear that metal is now at dead end. No new avenues exist. Any new metal band that comes out will sound too much like other bands already out. Metal will become like classical music, kids will study it and perform the screaming guitar solos, copy the machine gun sounds of the base drum, and will sound just like their heroes.
Of course this is not a problem that only afflicts metal; all of music builds on the work of others. Anyway I dirgress…
Leviathan by Mastodon is a brilliant work and despite being a little bit derivative is still number 5 on my list of this years album.

posted by andrew niemand @ 10:28 AM