Even though I listen to so much music, the quality overall is pretty damn stellar. Only a handful of albums and artists ever raise my ire. Because of this, I'm grouping what little I didn't like together. It makes it easier for me, and I hope, for you.
Pretty much every time I listen to an instrumental band - of any genre - I always draw reference to the Cloudkicker article I wrote a while back and the good and bad with instrumental bands. I really need to write a stand-alone article about this subject, but until then just know that Mahatma embodies what is bad with the instrumental genre. The majority of their songs on Gilgamesh are droning, repetitive doom songs, with the same rhythm repeated seemingly endlessly for eight or nine minutes. The opening track “Blood On Uruk” is a perfect example; when I was listening to this song, I mistakenly thought I had chosen the first track from the Under The Sun album, Man of Sorrow (which will get a review here soon). While I thought it was “Stride” (the first track off Man of Sorrow) I was ok with it, because it sounded like the intro for a movie, when the hero is walking up a road with the credits spliced in. I figured it to be an intro piece, and the fact that it was that repetitive and dull didn't matter, because soon the good music would chime in. Eventually I figured out it was Mahatma I was listening to, and my expectation that the album would get better was cast aside. The disc did not get any more interesting when it moved to the second track, and most of the album fell into this, dull and repetitive, category. The only two songs that stood out in any way were “Enkidu's End” and “Find The Sacred Herb.” The former was a good rock song, it was energetic and had several different melodies and styles, while the latter was more akin to the rest of the album, but it had some sweet grinding guitars, just simple chugging throughout, but it made the whole picture work. The rest of the disk, just throw it away, or use it for background noise for TV or movies, when you just need some filler while the characters talk or drive or something.