Last month, Mastodon released a compilation to mark the band’s 20th anniversary. But what’s the real story? Let’s not bury the lede: “Fallen Torches” is the raison d’être of Mastodon’s recently released compilation Medium Rarities. A tribute to the passing of their long-time manager and close friend Nick John, “Fallen Torches” harkens back to the Mastodon of the mid-to-late aughts, mixing spacy melody with frantic fills and legitimately heavy riffing. It sounds something like a forward-looking Blood Mountain b-side, coupling its climactic mega-riff with the more subtle and subdued approach that Mastodon would take in the early ’10s. In that sense, … Continue reading Mastodon’s Medium Rarities and the Case of the Curious Compilation