Mastodon Tears Open The Skye

Setting foot into the world of Mastodon’s fourth and most ambitious effort to date, Crack The Skye, is a bit like being locked in a room where the psychedelic elite are mashing together plans to clone Tolkien and send him off to the 5th dimension. With intensely intricate guitar arrangements, details-obsessed production led by knob guru Brendan O’Brien and exponentially more melodic, full vocals, there’s no arguing that this quartet of Southern badasses has raised their own game considerably. The restless souls floating in the ether of Skye represent the fourth featured step in the fire/water/earth theme sequence of Mastodon’s first three records, and if you can follow that, you’re in for a hell of a treat with this album.

Brann Dailor’s nearly peerless kitwork is once again the rhythmic centerpiece of the album, where shifting polyrhythmic undercurrents, intricate fills and God-thunder sonic assaults await the meticulous listener. What album opener Oblivion lacks in immediate muscle, it makes up for in spades with an ominous array of chords laying the foundation for the entire album to build upon. The shifting passages and percussive hurricanes of serve a backdrop to the mystical storyline, replete with menacing harmonies and cascading fills. There’s a greater sense of calculation here, like Mastodon took a few math classes during their downtime between tripping balls on whatever psychedelics they tapped into to make this album. Once the train gets moving, there’s a notable trade of crunch-doom for blazing riff waves, and an up-step of vocal melody that will undoubtedly throw some die-hards off- but likely win over a whole new audience. The beast that is Mastodon has expanded its horizons, you see, and suddenly they’ve entered the market where Tool and the Deftones meet Neurosis. It’s a good fit.

Mastodon has always taken great care to reward their fans’ enthusiasm for detail, and nowhere is this more evident than in the album’s lyrical design. 2004’s Leviathan was loaded with imagery from Herman Melville’s Moby Dick, while 2006’s Blood Mountain was a muscle-car trip through a veritable safari of mythological creatures- but those were hors d’oeuvres served in the doorway to the temple of interdimensional psychedelics that is unveiled today with Crack The Skye. In multiple interviews drummer Dailor has said the record would tell a story addressing the art aesthetics of Tsarist Russia, astral travel, out of body experiences and Stephen Hawking’s theories on wormholes. Which, Incidentally, is exactly what the last Jonas Brothers record was about.

Because there’s simply no linear way to break down the onion-like layers of this narrative, we’ll just have to trust that Dailor isn’t fucking us around when he describes the album’s underlying story: “There is a paraplegic and the only way that he can go anywhere is if he astral travels. He goes out of his body, into outer space and a bit like Icarus, he goes too close to the sun, burning off the golden umbilical cord that is attached to his solar plexus. So he is in outer space and he is lost, he gets sucked into a wormhole, he ends up in the spirit realm and he talks to spirits telling them that he is not really dead. So they send him to the Russian cult, they use him in a divination and they find out his problem. They decide they are going to help him. They put his soul inside Rasputin’s body. Rasputin goes to usurp the czar and he is murdered. The two souls fly out of Rasputin’s body through the crack in the sky(e) and Rasputin is the wise man that is trying to lead the child home to his body because his parents have discovered him by now and think that he is dead. Rasputin needs to get him back into his body before it’s too late. But they end up running into the Devil along the way and the Devil tries to steal their souls and bring them down… there are some obstacles along the way.”

Mortality certainly runs a thick thread through the album’s heart, and the musical melodrama is laid on thick- but not from a dishonest point of reference. In addition to a narrative core more psychedelically twisted than Maynard James Keenan on a DMT trip is a more heartbreaking undercurrent: Dailor has also said that Crack The Skye is meant as an homage to his sister, Skye Dailor, who took her own life at the terribly young age of 14.

“My sister passed away when I was a teenager and it was awful, and there’s no better way to pay tribute to a lost loved one than having an opportunity to be in a group with my friends and we make art together. Her name was Skye, so it means a lot of different things. For me personally, it means the moment of being told you lost someone dear to you, [that moment] is enough to crack the sky.”

Needless to say, a little brooding is justified here, given the subject matter- but never so much as to weigh down the movement unnecessarily. Rather than the cookie monster barking that most modern acts would resort to, the angle is geared more toward melody and vocal design. The layered harmonies, vocal interplay and evolved techniques are crucial elements to the inevitable success of Crack The Skye. Singer Brett Hinds’ previous vocal approach simply wouldn’t have worked this time around. The production is just too grand, the order of ambition too tall. Evidence can be found in Divinations, the album’s fret-melting first single:

Quintessence is built on fits of hardcore thrashing mixed with dreamy synths and godlike vocals, while the double-bass assault of Ghost Of Karelia is a welcome revisiting of the band’s signature style and lyrical doom: Wrathful ones, nine eyes gaze / Holding skulls / Filled and laced / With human blood …sounds about right.

Choral harmonies are the sweetest part of the futuristic prog–metal classic The Czar, the record’s four–part centerpiece. It’s easily the album’s most interesting track, with arpeggiated riffs building bridges across shifting movements and blistering transitions. The guitar volleys and upped-ante soloing between Hinds and Kelliher is crushing, and we’re reminded again that Brann’s percussive fusillades are enough to stand tall against the finest on the kit today.

After The Czar, the intimidating, 13-minute prog juggernaut The Last Baron is the album’s most explosive march, a frantic percussive whirlpool and soaring melody- about watching the end of the world, of course- weaving through dizzying rhythmic shifts. The melody stays largely unchanged, but the art-rock metal blasts are counter-clashing spectacles, like fireworks shot at one another and captured right at the moment where impact becomes detonation and the fabric of pre-existing reality is torn- or cracked, if you will- wide open. It’s Rush meets Yes meets Helmet with a hardcore knack for out-of-body astral adventures and interstellar wormholes.

Ultimately, Crack The Skye is prog metal as seen through an astral kaleidoscope. It’s a massive show , he sweet, rare sound of untethered ambition being achieved. It’s a vastly complex, intricate trip to places no rock band has ever gone before. Eat your heart out Coheed And Cambria.

Crack The Skye
March 24
Reprise

01. Oblivion
02. Divinations
03. Quintessence
04. The Czar
   I. Usurper
   II. Escape
   III. Martyr
   IV. Spiral
05. Ghost Of Karelia
06. Crack The Skye
07. The Last Baron