Big Business

Hearing bands gripe about the ineffectiveness of genres and classification can be rather tiresome. Then you hear something so uniquely diverse as Big Business's tertiary effort, Mind The Drift, and realize that maybe all of the frustration and striving to elude definition is justified. In essence, the album is the perfect culmination of Mastodon's progressive muscle swirling around inherent melodic twists, the occasional jazz tendencies, sludge/doom metal's relentless riffs and rolling rhythms, giving Mind The Drift a sensation of the listener being crushed by a tidal wave of music and then pulled down in the ensuing undertow. All that, and a wealth of rich harmonies that lend an almost majestic atmosphere to the experience. With so many opposing elements combining to form Mind The Drift, one can see that the addition of guitarist Toshi Kasai was mutually beneficial. Not only is he afforded bragging rights about fleshing out the Big Business sound but he actually does it. Were it not such a horrible stigma to be attached one could easily argue that Big Business, with Mind The Drift, are the King Crimson of 2009.