About a week ago we had a post regarding Mastodon having no shortage of new material for its upcoming album, which appears to include its currently-unreleased 2014 EP. So how much material is "no shortage," exactly? Try two full-lengths worth.
According to a recent interview with Guitar World, guitarist Brent Hinds wrote an entire Mastodon album by himself titled Cold Dark Place, which is about a difficult breakup he'd recently gone through. The second album in the anticipated duet sounds like it was written by everyone in the band who isn't Brent Hinds, whose only apparent contribution will be guitar solos played while standing on a chair (seriously).
“It’s shaping up to be a double album. One is an album I wrote myself, and recorded with [drummer] Brann [Dailor] and [bassist/vocalist] Troy [Sanders] during the ‘Once More ‘Round The Sun‘ sessions. My part is called ‘Cold Dark Place‘, and it has to do with a nasty breakup that I went through. I wrote some pretty dark, beautiful, spooky, funky, ethereal, melancholy music, which also sounds like the Bee Gees a little bit. [laughs]
The other guys are writing another album, which I haven’t even heard yet so I can’t tell you what it sounds like. But I’ll come in to give some noodle-y leads here and there. And for sure I’ll be recording with my new signature Flying V…while standing on top of a chair with a werewolf mask on. And that’s not a joke; I really do that. I never sit down to record. You can’t sit down and play a Flying V, everyone knows that.”
I'm a huge Mastodon fan, and I'm definitely stoked for a new album, but I'm really curious as to how this abundance of material is going to be released. You've got Cold Dark Place, you've got songs from 2014 that may or may not be rolled into either half of the album, and then you've got an album written by a band sans Hinds. So will it all be one massive package that flows together well? Will the band stagger the releases so it's more palatable?
That's even if this whole things actually pans out to be a double album. Maybe the band will knock it down to just a single album with select tracks.
