Rhapsody Reviews: Mastodon

Progressive metal badasses Mastodon have put out concept albums before. Leviathan is dedicated to and about Melville's Moby-Dick; and Blood Mountain is about man's struggle with nature, specifically getting lost in the woods at night and facing all the things that could happen, like getting attacked by a one-eyed sasquatch that can see the future ("Circle of Cysquatch").

This latest album, their fourth, follows several seemingly disparate ideas and ties them all together with the band's now-accepted talent for linking song parts to one another, their particularly onomatopoeic use of rhythm (Leviathan actually rolls like the ocean), and, for those of us who care about such things, awesome, awesome guitars. The songs on Crack the Skye are concerned with the loneliness of death, astral travel, a spirit that enters a wormhole and ends up inhabiting Rasputin's body and ... um ... stuff like that. The attendant jams are built around bass lines and guitar parts that groove like the good parts of "Starship Trooper" (do not miss the 8:20 mark in "The Last Baron"), sketching a sort of spirit ride through space. Nods to classic rock pepper the album, from Animals-era Floyd ("Oblivion") to the life-death-rebirth-but-really-just-death cycle it shares with the Pretty Things' S.F. Sorrow and the melodic vocal parts learned directly from Peter Gabriel-era Genesis that emerge in just about every song at some point.

This is not your run-of-the-mill major label rock music (even in an era when metal is getting so much attention in the mainstream). Mastodon has turned a pretty cool trick, selling their music on a massive scale while retaining the characteristics that have marked them as one of outsider metal's most interesting acts (read: the weirdness) since they first turned up in the early '00s confusing people (read: me) with their Thin Lizzy-gone-death-metal guitars. Crack the Skye is simply where they're at right now -- astral travel and Rasputin and such, with less death metal thud and more vectoring jammery -- and it works. The best thing about Mastodon is that, with each record, they don't evolve so much as they just get more to the core of their potential.