When receiving music to review, such is the modern idiom that physical material is rarer and rarer, high quality downloads being the norm, with the ability to reach reviewers the world over without the fear of loss or damage by various postal organisations. The link I was sent by Intoxicated Recordings, a brand new label I’d never heard of was one such message, although it was one of the most professional and thorough I’ve seen in ages, laced through with dire warnings of copyright infringements being traced and leading to consequences such as, and I quote verbatim “If the material is “leaked” and traced back to you, we will seek applicable restitution.” Stern stuff indeed, only slightly diluted by the fact that within a couple of days of getting the download, and before you’ll read this review, the album in question, ‘Mammoth Mountain’, the debut of King Mammoth, became available only as a free download on Bandcamp!
So, what do you get if you decide to click below and listen to the cost free offerings of this four piece that hail from Denmark? Well, apart from value for money that cannot be equalled, what you get is three tracks of epic underground stoner doom, which despite each weighing in at over ten minutes a piece, and having the same roots in all things slow and heavy, each manage to have a different and distinct character. Whilst my dictionary defines a stampede as “any headlong general flight or rush”, opening track ‘Mammoth Stampede’ moves with all the urgency of an encroaching Ice Age, and with a similar crushing inexorability, slow fuzzy beats being mixed with a frenetic guitar solo that owes far more to enthusiasm than technical wizardry, all rough edges and feedback. ‘As The Mastodon Tramples’ experiments with a wall of distortion lasting a full half of its twelve minute length before sludgy pained vocals are thrown into the midst of looping bass heavy riffs that drone throughout the rest of the track, and the album closes with ‘Last March of the Ancients’, a fourteen minute instrumental exploration of stoner space rock which is only lacking a Theramin to transform it all the way into the realms of pure Prog.
Back when I was was young, in the age before the internet and mobile phones, demos like ‘Mammoth Mountain’, and it does have the flavour of a demo about it, would have been swapped around on tapes at local gigs or in assorted rock and metal clubs; in this modern age, King Mammoth can have their music put out for all the technologically connected world to hear at the press of a button, and that can only be a good thing. As a showcase for potential, ‘Mammoth Mountain’ has a lot to commend it, and with time and luck, this won’t be the last time the band is heard from.
(6.5/10 Spenny)
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