The Mammoth is big. It’s unlikely that Ghost of the Russian Empire named the album to describe their sound, but it’s certainly fitting. On their first LP (following last year’s EP, With Fiercest Demolition EP), Ghost of the Russian Empire push with post-rock intensity and eloquence, offering a frightening conceptual album large enough to get lost in while also being surgically concise.

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Ghost of the Russian Empire create a world of their own their latest album The Mammoth. Actually, it’s a world marked by lucid memories of the best spy movies you’ve seen, maybe an audio representation of something like Munich (am I the only one who thinks this movie is pretty cool?). Generally, it makes for a very in depth experience, especially when listening to the album straight through.

The production side of The Mammoth was managed almost entirely by Eric Wofford, who at this point is to me like a stamp of excellence on any album I pick up. Forget the “Featuring” sticker listing the singles, just put a “Erik Wofford had a hand in this” stamp on there and I’ll buy it.

The album sounds huge - not as in “huge guitars,” I mean as in general space. There’s enough reverb on the vocals to make Thom Yorke swoon, and no guitar comes without mountainous echoes. The sound is fitting, as the lyrics often describe vague and cryptic events from a distance. On this track, “A Decade Without A Death,” for example, we get Brandon Whitten warning us that “the forecast calls for sirens,” and then there’s the ominous “it takes strides, not steps, to conquer a planet.”

The video ventures into the concept directly with Russian language spy gadgets, old men in hats with mysteriously attractive young women, and of course, the band themselves. The video was done by local production company Revelator Productions, and boy does it look great. Check it out after the jump, and be sure to get the new album when it drops on May 13th. Expect a full review soon.

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