Mr Mason Jennings has got a bit dark. In his eighth album, Blood of Man, Mason covers themes of religion, war, drug addiction, and madness, which, granted, he has done before, but not with such lyrical intensity as we see here. I was drawn in right away by the opening track City of Ghosts which seems to show Mason’s attempt to ‘punch out’ against modern American society. This theme pops up again in the song ‘In the Field,’ (easily the best anti-war song of 2009), which tells the story of a parent mourning the loss of their child as they go off to fight in the middle-east, and is. The album reflects a lot of common fears in American society today and is definitely Mason’s most emotional outing yet. Go get it.