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''Remission'' is the full-length debut album by American heavy metal band Mastodon. It was released on May 28, 2002 through Relapse Records and was re-released on October 21, 2003. - Wikipedia

It's said that many a trapper, prospector and gulag convict has come across a frozen woolly mammoth on the Siberian tundra and roasted the beast over his campfire for a tasty dinner. Well, if creatures from the Pleistocene era can still be useful, so can those with musical DNA dating back to the 1970s. Mastodon is one such animal; catching the band live in Baltimore almost two years ago, I was awed by the way their Neurosis-style sludge and math-rock complexity was shot through with pure glittering veins of Rush. Prog has been called dinosaur rock so often that to hear a band display progressive tendencies as though they were in fact heavy enough to populate Jurassic Park was pretty cool. While the early incarnation of Mastodon had a tendency to sprawl too messily across both stage and studio, on Remission the four-piece delivers both the chops and the songs, and its anthems are blessed with titles to die for: "March of the Fire Ants" (sounds like it says), "Ol' Nessie" (ditto), "Where Strides the Behemoth" (again) and "Trampled Under Hoof" (you get the picture). Originally released last year, Remission has been reissued in a deluxe digipak with a bonus DVD of the band's live show from Atlanta, Georgia in 2002, in which four hairy creatures sway violently while musical instruments and the human voice ululate, howl and kick out the jams. Mastodon rock so perfectly, you'll wish you were a geologist.

 

"It's said that many a trapper, prospector and gulag convict has come across a frozen woolly mammoth on the Siberian tundra and roasted the beast over his campfire for a tasty dinner. Well, if creatures from the Pleistocene era can still be useful, so can those with musical DNA dating back to the 1970s. Mastodon is one such animal; catching the band live in Baltimore almost two years ago, I was awed by the way their Neurosis-style sludge and math-rock complexity was shot through with pure glittering veins of Rush. Prog has been called dinosaur rock so often that to hear a band display progressive tendencies as though they were in fact heavy enough to populate Jurassic Park was pretty cool. While the early incarnation of Mastodon had a tendency to sprawl too messily across both stage and studio, on Remission the four-piece delivers both the chops and the songs, and its anthems are blessed with titles to die for: ""March of the Fire Ants"" (sounds like it says), ""Ol' Nessie"" (ditto), ""Where Strides the Behemoth"" (again) and ""Trampled Under Hoof"" (you get the picture). Originally released last year, Remission has been reissued in a deluxe digipak with a bonus DVD of the band's live show from Atlanta, Georgia in 2002, in which four hairy creatures sway violently while musical instruments and the human voice ululate, howl and kick out the jams. Mastodon rock so perfectly, you'll wish you were a geologist.

 

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