If 2012 is the last year we have on this planet, then at least the musicians are helping us go out with a bang. Over the past few days a spate of reunions have been announced, including the ‘always rumoured, never happening’ reformations of At the Drive In and Refused.

To many, this news is no more significant than the miserable fart of an asthmatic gnat among the countryside. But it has been enough to send a fair few into frenzied fits of incomprehensible tweets and boisterous Facebook statuses, such is the way this generation shares its most thrilling moments.

There is, however, often a degree of cynicism to these reformations. Those who were lucky enough to have been conceived at the right time to witness the bands first time round sneer at those excited of the prospect of seeing that which they thought they never would.

It’s exacerbated in the case of the two bands mentioned previously, because the members of these bands have sneered themselves at the idea of revisiting the past. At the Drive In all fell out, as did the members of Refused. Heck, any band on the reunion circuit these days has probably had to spend a fair bit of that paycheque to sit on a couch with a therapist and make nice before hitting the road.

And there’s another criticism – the lure of money. When I finally got round to seeing Rage Against the Machine in 2010 (after having just missed them the first time round due to youthful naivety and parents who decided to wait a while before burdening themselves with a child) it was a great experience, but one tinged with hollowness. A bit like finally getting it on with the class hottie… but at a school reunion 40 years later, after she lost both legs in an accident with industrial machinery.

But I couldn’t answer that criticism any better than Radio 1 DJ Daniel P Carter has done, in a reactionary piece for Rock Sound. “I would rather watch a bunch of 30 year-old guys play some awesome songs they wrote than see a bunch of 20 year-old guys play bad rip-offs of those same songs.”

And that’s why – despite a nagging doubt that it just won’t be the same as it was 10 years ago – I’m still excited about the reunions of At the Drive In and Refused. We’ve all seen enough bands acting like these seminal bands. But nobody bests the originals, even if they are rapidly approaching middle age.

If there’s one thing to say about the men behind Mastodon, it’s this – they’ve always gone out of their way to valiantly charge into the realms of imagination that the sane would flee from in tears. But with The Hunter, the follow-up to the bewilderingly successful Crack the Skye, this fearless beast is showing hints of becoming domesticated.

Five albums in, and there’s a noticeable element of change. Gone is the intricate album artwork of Paul Romano, replaced with the confounding sculpture work of AJ Fosik; Brendan O’Brien – who managed to stop the band scurrying up their own arses during the recording of the titanic Crack the Skye – has been replaced with the pop/hip hop orientated producer Mike Elizondo. How’s this for a bit of controversy – past clients include Eminem, Dr Dre and, gulp, Maroon 5.

In fairness, Elizondo does a good job of capturing the raucous vibes of the rock genre’s most monolithic of men. ‘Curl of the Burl’ sees Mastodon at their most accessible; a brief sojourn with a devilishly catchy chorus that drills itself into the mind like a musical woodpecker, if such a thing was to exist. His job has clearly been to take this unapproachable bunch of beardy misfits and their divisive sound, douse them in water and tone the prehistoric rumblings down to a more acceptable level.

That’s where The Hunter falters. For all its drive and frantic pace, staples of the Mastodon juggernaut, there is a constant feeling that the band has lost some of the wildly adventurous silliness that made them so easy to fall in love with, regardless of what you thought of Brent Hinds’ chicken-squawk screams.

The title track, burrowed in between the raucous ‘All the Heavy Lifiting’ and rampaging ‘Dry Bone Valley’, is one such disappointment. A plodding rhythm is salvaged with the Masto-trope of a wailing guitar halfway through, but little salvages the awkward lyrics [All the love I make/Is equal to the love I take] and their strained delivery. The ‘Don of the past had some outrageous lyrical themes to fall back on when the music dwindled, but where Leviathan‘s opening track, ‘Blood and Thunder’ inspired a whole internet meme, there’s little on The Hunter that is likely to inspire the same kind of devotion.

It’s that sense of two-steps-forward, one-step-back that makes The Hunter a bit of a disappointment. Bands will always need to adapt to survive, and often that leads to controversy among those who felt connected with the band of old. But The Hunter feels like more than that – like an essential element of what made Mastodon the band it was has been scaled back. I wouldn’t go so far as to suggest the band has ‘sold out’ – an idea no more idiotic than the concept behind Jurassic Park – but the insane magic the Mastodon of old produced is greatly subdued.

Perhaps it’s to Mastodon’s credit that it is their impressive back catalogue that exacerbates the feeling of disappointment in The Hunter. When Crack the Skye came out it befuddled critics and fans alike. Listening to it, you felt on the edge of sanity itself and it was that sensation that drew the listener back, time and time again. But there’s little of that on The Hunter. It is, unfortunately, just a collection of songs. Not bad songs, but not utterly bewildering, blow-your-pants-off, we’re-going-down-that-rabbit-hole-at-3,000mph songs, either. We’ll put this one down as the lads from Mastodon taking a well-deserved break from the breakneck insanity of past material.

Originally published at The Line of Best Fit.

Album Review:

Foo Fighters, despite their stadium-rock popularity, have never been a band I have loved. They have never, unlike Dave Grohl’s previous exploits in Nirvana and Queens of the Stone Age, been a band that has resonated with me on a level other than a bit of superficial fun. They have always been a singles band, perfectly suited to the click-and-get nature of the iTunes generation. But I admit: Wasting Light hasn’t left my ear canals since my first listen.

Maybe it’s no surprise that this is the most genuine album the band have put out since the much-lauded early-years material. In an effort to get back in touch with their roots, recording took place in Dave Grohl’s garage studio (which I’m willing to bet is still a million times better than your run-of-the-mill set up, but I’ll let that slide), there are guest spots from Pat Smear and Krist Novoselic — which, in all honesty, come across as PR boxes to tick than notable performances — and Grohl himself admitted that it was time for Foo Fighters to “be a rock band again”.

It’s a wise sentiment. In recent years the band’s incredible success has seen them fill stadiums, albeit with some material that Bon Jovi would have been happy to put his stamp of approval on. Dave Grohl’s ‘the nicest man in rock’ tag is well deserved, but I don’t think it’s too unfair to say that the man — and the band — have been in desperate need to grow some balls as of late.

Well, Wasting Light is a genuine, and thankful, improvement. There’s an undeniable crunch to everything that hints at a band rediscovering a rawer edge, as if stripping back years of polish to find a rusty foundation underneath. For the most part, gone are those echoes of ‘Everlong’ that so riddled the past few Foo Fighters’ albums, replaced with a more rapid tempo, and Grohl rediscovering his iconic growl.

‘Bridge Burning’ is the band jump-starting the engine, a typical Foos single that combines all the facets the band has assimilated in its 16 year history. Heavy, but no less catchy guitar hook? Check. Grohl singing like he’s practicing for the next Wembley show? Check. And a rousing final minute to quicken the pulse and leave a sugary buzz in the head? Well, that’s just a given.

The highlight is penultimate track ‘I Should Have Known’. As mentioned above, Foos dalliances with acoustic, heart rendering ballads may have found an appreciative audience, but to me they have always been weak and to the detriment of the band. But, despite the opening violin flutters and scaled back tone, ‘I Should Have Known’ is an emotionally-laden ballad done right — actually building to something more than the typical Foos structure of verse, chorus, verse chorus and snore.

Wasting Light isn’t groundbreaking stuff. If anything, it succeeds in its mission to become a throwback to the origins of the Foos. Whether that’s a damning indictment of what the band has been up to in recent years or not is up to the listener at the end of the day. Wasting Light is a good rock record that proves that, somewhere deep inside his soul, Dave Grohl wishes he was still a total unknown, sweating in front of three people in a pokey, basement venue. Those days are long gone, but this is a notable step in the right direction.

Leeds’ Vessels have managed to impress a great number of people with their follow-up to 2008′s White Fields and Open Devices. Helioscope is a stunning record, and one worth checking out if you’re into the likes of Mogwai and bands of that ilk. If what I said about the album hasn’t convinced you, then have a read of what guitarist/vocalist Tom Evans has to say of their record, and what went on behind the scenes.

The Only Thing I Know For Sure: Hello Vessels, how are you all?

Tom Evans: Very well thanks. Chuffed that the response to the new album seems to be mostly positive!

TOTIKFS: It’s been a three-year gap between White Fields and Open Devices and Helioscope. What have you learned about Vessels as a band in that time?

TE: We’ve learned that actually we wanna make music that people can dance to. Not ‘dance’ music as such (Lee produces proper techno under his full name Lee J. Malcolm), but music which is danceable whilst still retaining enough of a cerebral quality that you can listen on headphones in your armchair and enjoy it all the same. This doesn’t apply to all of the tracks on the new album — there’s a few ambient numbers on there and I suspect they’ll be some on the next one as well, but that’s definitely the general vibe in camp Vessels right now.

TOTIKFS: Having taken your time recording Helioscope, there must have been a lot of inspirations and ideas that developed throughout the course of recording. Care to share?

TE: We spent the first year and a half pretty much going down musical dead ends — we were still trying to write all the music through developing jams into full compositions, which can work sometimes but is pretty arduous and frustrating when it doesn’t work. We ended up with about 25 or 30 ideas that we were convinced would be the basis for the new album, but in the end none of them made it on. It’s not that they weren’t any good, either — they just weren’t exciting us in terms of direction. It was only when we started demoing all the new music as we wrote it that we started making real progress. Just having the capacity to have an idea, record it, listen to and evaluate it within minutes sped the process up massively. With jams the same process can take hours. We still jammed together to get ideas and inspiration, but when it comes to putting the composition of the tunes together, demoing is definitely the way forward.

TOTIKFS: Just what is a Helioscope, and what relevance does it have to the music on the record?

TE: A Helioscope is a device for looking at the sun, like a pin-hole camera but with a telescope attached. Just as the first album, White Fields… was recorded in snowy Minneapolis, this album was recorded under the scorching sun of a Texan summer. I think the album definitely sounds a bit more sun-scorched than the last-one. Not in a Beach Boys way, mind. It’s definitely more sun-scorched than sun-drenched.

TOTIKFS: White Fields… was a great album, but it did suffer from feeling a bit disjointed at times. Helioscope certainly feels to be a more coherent collection of songs — do you think you’ve nailed the Vessels ‘sound’?

TE: I don’t think so, and I kind of hope not. I agree that this album is more coherent — the debut was basically a collection of the best tunes we’d written up to that point, whereas we definitely tried to approach this as one piece of work. But whilst we’ve got closer to achieving our own ‘sound’ on this record, I would like think that this ‘sound’ is fluid and constantly changing, so I wouldn’t want to ever ‘nail’ it.

TOTIKFS: How did Stuart Warwick’s (who sings on lead single ‘Meatman, Piano Tuner, Prostitute’) involvement come about?

TE: He’s been a friend of ours for several years now and we’d watched him as Jacob’s Stories loads and always been blown away. We’d been chatting about a collaboration for ages, and it finally came together with this track. He came to Leeds for the weekend and wrote and recorded these vocals onto the demo version in one afternoon, the talented fella that he is. We then took the data files of his voice and dropped them onto the final mix, et voila!

TOTIKFS: Given that Vessels originated from that instrumental-esque, post-rock vibe, what was it like working with John Congleton, who has already worked with some big names in this genre?

TE: The reason we initially contacted him was after hearing his work on the Explosions In The Sky and Appleseed Cast albums, and it was a shot in the dark so we were surprised that we ended up with the opportunity to work with him. He’s great to work with though — very understanding of the need to be in a good mood to make a good record.

TOTIKFS: How much did his experience influence the direction you saw Vessels going in?

TE: His ability to make massive drums sound even more massive was an important factor in us choosing to work with him again. In terms of influence on Vessels’ direction, it was probably the fact that we loved the records he made and they influenced us by being so awesome!

TOTIKFS: Who’s behind the fantastic artwork that features on the cover of Helioscope?

TE: An artist called Luke Drozd (lukedrozd.com), who has done all of our artwork and T-shirt designs since our second 7″ single. The story is just a nice bit of synchronicity, really – I’d been talking to a friend who’d been working for a planetarium at the festivals last summer, and when describing it he said: “They also have a helioscope… well, solar-telescope actually, but helioscope sounds cooler.” This was at the time we were trying to think of album titles, so any cool sounding words were instantly added to the list of potentials. A few days later, Luke sent through sketches for album cover art ideas, his favourite of which was a massive hand setting fire to a city with a magnifying glass. The combination of name and image were far too good to resist, and he really pulled out the goods for the final design. The vinyl album looks truly beautiful.

TOTIKFS: As a relatively small band, it’s interesting to see you embrace the internet for promotion purposes. What’s the idea behind giving away tracks for free, and using platforms like Soundcloud to get your music across to new ears – do you see this as essential to getting as many people listening to Vessels as possible?

TE: Definitely. There’s a million bands vying for your attention, and why shouldn’t people have the chance to hear some of your music before deciding whether they like you or not? If that means giving it away as a free download so people can spend some time with it rather than just streaming online, then that’s fine. Hopefully enough people will like it enough to buy the album or come to our shows, and help us clamber out of debt once again!

TOTIKFS: Leeds really has a stunning output of bands at the moment – Chickenhawk, Pulled Apart By Horses etc — where’s all this talent erupted from? What’s the kinsmanship like between the bands in the scene?

TE: There’s been more great bands in Leeds than I could count for as long as I can remember. I’ve known some of the guys in those bands for nearly ten years now. There’s a lot of mutual love and cross-fertilisation — when one good band splits up, two great bands appear from its ashes. Someone once told me that LS6 has the highest population density of musicians in the country, and that wouldn’t surprise me at all.

TOTIKFS: What’s in store for Vessels for the rest of the year?

TE: We’re touring Europe in May, and hopefully will play somewhere outdoors this summer. We’ll probably play some more shows later in the year as well.

TOTIKFS: What are you looking forward to most throughout the rest of the year?

TE: Probably utilising our awesome new studio space to start writing album number three! We’ve got some ambitious ideas brewing in our bonces, and we can’t wait to try them all out!

Album Review:

Whatever is being put in the water in Leeds, it’s having a magical effect on the quality of musicianship pouring out of the place. Vessels are the latest in a healthy list of bands to come out of the city with a strong record, Helioscope being a much more measured and concise account of what the five-piece have got stored away in their noggins.

Their debut release, White Fields and Open Devices, picked up deserved attention for its rich and dynamic nature – it was an album that sounded far beyond the scope of a band releasing its first album, and managed to avoid falling into many of the tropes that the accursed ‘post-rock’ tag seems to attract. Helioscope sees the band learning from some of their overreaching ambitions on that first album, focussing instead on creating a record that ebbs and flows, as if all 48 minutes were forged from a single hazy dream.

For those who are wary of the aforementioned ‘post-rock’ tag, don’t let it put you off. If anything, it’s hard to determine fully what Helioscope is trying to be. The band are not afraid to use their voices as instruments, to pleasing effect; at times the vocals sound distant from the assured nature of the instruments backing them, creating an evocative atmosphere. Nowhere is this better realised than in ‘Meatman, Piano Tuner, Prostitute’, where the band enrol the services of melancholic singer songwriter, Stuart Warwick. His timid vocal performance lends the track an ethereal delicacy, a fragility that stands out among the rougher moments of Helioscope, notably the dark and bass-heavy machinations of ‘Art/Choke’, which follows immediately after.

What is most commendable on Helioscope is that nothing ever feels rushed. It’s an album that you can truly sink into. ‘Later Than You Think’ sounds aurally similar to something Battles might craft, but the difference is in its patience, the slow build-up that eases, rather than rushes, into the next crescendo. Yes, this is perhaps one of those tropes that ‘post-rock’ continues to bleed dry, but on Helioscope as a whole, the effect is that Vessels have created an atmosphere rather than just a collection of songs. It’s no easy feat, especially when still managing to be riveting to the ears, so it deserves recognition.

There’s also a meticulous attention to dynamics, evidenced in the way the recurring theme of ‘The Trap’ cuts back just before its conclusion. But every track boasts a rich texture to it, and with a pair of headphones on it feels as if you could completely immerse yourself in the tapestry woven therein. At the risk of sounding hyperbolic, it’s reminiscent of Mogwai’s Young Team: nothing feels wasted, and the peaks and troughs are all equally enthralling to the ears.

Helioscope is a vast step forward for Vessels. White Fields and Open Devices was good, yes, but it was disjointed, overambitious and at times, a bit of a drag. Its follow-up is nothing of the sort – it achieves that sense whereby every time you listen to it you notice something different; it’s immersive and richly textured; and best of all it sounds like a complete and coherent album. And despite the quality of music coming out of Leeds, not many are paying much heed to the worthiness of that kind of release. Perhaps that’s just me being old fashioned, eh?

Originally published at The Line of Best Fit.