Best Release Week Of The Year

This week was fucking EPIC for releases.

Mastodon and The Decemberists both put out amazing concept albums with tracks that seamlessly play through each other.

The Decemberists album has this amazing mood to it and flows beautifully from begining to end with reprises and a huge variety of musical stylings. The story is great, the added female vocals as a different character really provides great contrast to their enormous sound and its super-well produced.One of the most complete albums from the "indie" scene in years.

Mastodon also put one out...but they always have a theme to their albums. Theyve done Remission, their fire album, Leviathan, their water album, Blood Mountain, their earth album and now Crack The Skye, their....outer space universe record. And they pull it off in pure rock fashion departing from the relentless metal of their earlier work to create a moodier..spacey feel. It does still have that Mastodon/american metal feel to it, but you can tell the band was super focused when writing and recording this album and really went to a different place. Metalheads will be disappointed, but music fans will be thrilled with this album.

Guilty pleasure band Blue October put out a new album too and while it has a hard time comparing to the above mentioned releases, they definitely did create a solid rock record. Steve Lillywhite really did a great job producing the album and giving it an organic feel while still being completely accessable as a major label band rock album. The lyrics are as bad as ever, but its something you expect from bands like this.

And finally, the re-release of Pearl Jam's now classic debut album Ten came out. There are two discs. The first is simply the iconic album remastered by Bob Ludwig and the second is really interesting. Brendan O'Brien(who ironically also produced the new Mastodon album) took the master tape and re-mixed it(no not "remixed" it) to his own liking and added a few extra songs from the session on it too. Both discs sound really fucking good, and the new take on the album is so cool to hear. Well worth the purchase.

Thats all I got, back to studying the chords to Hotel California and the formation of U2s Claw stage.