Mastodon – Crack The Skye

After a somewhat lukewarm re-encounter with Mastodon through “Blood Mountain”, the next in line was 2009’s “Crack The Skye”.

After the wild sonic attack of “Blood Mountain”, “Crack The Skye” seemed to me like a step-up: a more mature, diverse and articulated album where the music had room to breathe and the guys could show they had the songwriting chops to go beyond the relentless, frantic riffing and huge wall of sound of previous albums.

Make no mistake: “Crack The Skye” sounds HUGE and powerful, it’s unmistakably a Mastodon album and some of its finest moments include breaks into the most abrasive riffs and wild drum parts. But at the same time it’s probably the band’s most “progressive” album, in the sense of displaying a wider soundscape diversity, and the use of contrasts that make you appreciate more the heavier parts when they hit.

Maybe Brendan O’Brien’s hand behind the controls played an important role as to why the band sounds as it does here, as this was his first and last (to date) time producing the guys. Who knows?

Whatever the reason, “Crack The Skye” remains an oddity within the band’s catalogue and my favourite album out of it, mostly due to that enormous song titled “The Czar”, a mesmerizing beast with as many heads as Hydra, all of them deathly. To this day, the break between the “The Usurper” and “Escape” sections remains one of the finest bits in modern metal (to me anyway), and the rest of the song is nothing short of magnificent, perfectly distilling the band’s essence closely followed by “The Last Baron”, another dense but refreshing suite with further sick twists and breaks.

The remaining, shorter songs are also solidly inspired, with “Oblivion” opening with an eerie, slow arpeggio that reminds how the guys can sound dense and evil without being explicitly aggressive, and a great guitar solo in the second half. “Ghost Of Karelia” and the title song are also highlights of an album that was conceived by a band in the sweetest moment of its career, that will satisfy both metalheads and proggers. Not a small feat by any means.