Artvoice: Buffalo's #1 Newsweekly
Home Blogs Web Features Calendar Listings Artvoice TV Real Estate Classifieds Contact
Previous story: Prince - Lotusflow3r/MPLSound
Next story: Pasta Primavera, and Other Springtime Variations

Mastodon - Crack the Skye

Mastodon
Crack the Skye

(Reprise)

It’s a little surprising that producer Brendan O’Brien—known for streamlining the sound of everyone from Bruce Springsteen and Paul Westerberg to Pearl Jam and Rage Against the Machine—was the one to help to deliver Mastodon and their vision for a prog-rock-metal amalgam to its ultimate and near perfect result. O’Brien is often seen as the defanger of artists, bringing them to a wider and refined end, often to the chagrin of longtime fans. Detractors see O’Brien’s touch as more of a mainstreaming than a streamlining.

This time around, O’Brien definitely gets it right. The four-headed beast of drummer Brann Dailor, guitarists Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher, and bassist Troy Sanders is not so much reined in as let loose to create their vision. O’Brien takes the lean and mean elements along with the grandiose ideas of Mastodon and allows the band to push well beyond what was hinted at on 2006’s Blood Mountain. Crack the Skye is a modern collision of masterful heavy riffing and pounding beats, technical accuracy, psychedelic dashes, conceptual left turns, brash dynamics, and offbeat time signatures. It’s like Master of Reality meets Selling England by the Pound. The centerpiece—a four part journey in one track,“The Czar (Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral)”—delves into the story of Rasputin, astral planing, and timelessness. It doesn’t get more prog and more metal than that!

While this album finds a much more focused Mastodon perhaps grasping their greatness as one of America’s premier hard rock bands, older fans who might fear that the Mastodon they loved has gone soft can fear not: Take the title track, which marks the return of Brann Dailor’s double bass pedal assault and guest vocalist Scott Kelly (of Neurosis)—who has appeared on Mastodon’s previous efforts—back at the mic.

-—donny kutzbach

blog comments powered by Disqus