This is a story with a happy ending. Roughly two years ago, Decibel premiered the debut song from an unknown Arkansas sludge/doom band called Mammoth Caravan. It quickly found an audience, and the band got a nice Internet bump from the metal community.
Things got better from there. Mammoth Caravan played with some of their favorite bands and toured outside of their home state. Robert Warner left the kit behind for guitar, and a new drummer, Khetner Howton, joined the band. They even released a hot sauce. This month, Mammoth Carvan’s second album, Frostbitten Galaxy, was favorably reviewed in this magazine.
That’s not bad for a band that started with a simple email query. Sincerity and hard work can get you a long way.
“I did not expect the reaction we got to Ice Cold Oblivion,” vocalist and bassist Brandon Ringo said. “I’m extremely grateful for everything we achieved with that album. When we started working on the new album, we took some of the lessons we learned and incorporated them, such as spending more time tracking and creating the album rather than just recording to get something out as we did previously.”
Frostbitten Galaxy is, almost inconceivably, an album about mammoths in space. “It started as a joke at one of our first band practices,” Warner said. “Our first LP is about a baby mammoth getting chased from a herd and encased in ice. Our EP was about a paleontologist who finds the baby mammoth and, while uncovering it, cuts his finger on its tusk, exchanges DNA, and becomes a were-mammoth. Frostbitten Galaxy wraps up the story. The paleontologist has turned the whole world into mammoths and recreated the ice age, and in the process of building his new society, the were-mammoth king gets a call from alien life, sending him deep into space.”
WTF? Those edibles down south must kick very hard, folks. Fortunately, these tunes rip.
Stream the entirety of Frostbitten Galaxy below and preorder it here. The album is out via Blade Setter on October 4.
