Big Boi and André 3000 of Outkast in 1995. Photo: Raymond Boyd/Getty Images. Last weekend I was in Atlanta for a work conference. It’s a great town, but it’s in the Eastern time zone and it was humid, so I was in no condition to be writing anything. I…

Mastodon performs at Concord Pavilion in Concord, Calif. on April 20, 2023. Sean Liming/STAFF. CONCORD, Calif. — Metal mainstays Mastodon and Gojira brought their Mega-Monsters Tour to the Concord Pavilion on Thursday, shaking the hills with driving beats and shredding guitars. Mastodon was appropriately ready for April 20 occasion with its…

The best albums of 2021 include Wale, Torres, Eric Church, serpentwithfeet, Mdou Moctar, Valerie June, Danny Elfman, Bobby Gillespie and Jehnny Beth, Japanese Breakfast and Mastodon. Best of 202 Whew, we’ve almost made it halfway through our list of the best albums of 2021. This year may have felt…

Mastodon had a lot of steam to blow off. Hushed and Grim Mastodon Warner, Oct. 29 7/10 Between the death of the band’s longtime manager, Nick John, and the pandemic, it seemed the Atlanta metal veterans would come back big with Hushed and Grim, their first release since 2020…

It’s rare that an album’s title pretty much tells you what it contains. It’s refreshing that Mastodon called its new release Medium Rarities. Not only is it an excellent play on words referring to steak, but the album is also a collection of somewhat rare songs from the band’s 20-year…

Coming off its 2016 opus, Paradise Gallows, Inter Arma was still getting lumped in with the doom metal troop. It was understandably frustrating, considering the Virginia quintet’s unique blend of old-school death metal, psychedelic sludge and avant-garde black metal. Beside the gargantuan riffs of Steven Russell and Trey Dalton, Andrew…