Chris Townsend

Atlanta's probably not the first place you would think of when it comes to pulverizing heavy, prog-ish metal. But that probably suits Atlanta's Mastodon just fine.

Crack The Skye, the latest Reprise Records release from this bludgeoning conglomerate of prog rock, doom metal and pretty much anything heavy have really flown the coup with this release. And we're talking about a band that did a concept record based on Herman Mellville's Moby Dick.

From the first few sounds of this 50 plus minute opus it is readily apparent that the band truly means business this time around. The music is more cerebral and polished thanks in part to super producer and fellow Atlantan Brendan O'Brien, producer of such seminal rock records as Core form Stone Temple Pilots, Pearl Jam's Vs. and one of the most overlooked and underrated records of the 1990's, King's X's Dogman.

With O'Brien taking controls the band is focus and on surefooting. The album sounds like a mature group of musicians painstakingly breaking from the chains of their previous catalog and really getting down to the art of making thought provoking, exciting heavy music no matter what the average music consumer might think. If you dig Peter Gabriel era Genesis you'll love this record. Imagine Foxtrot on crystal meth...
 
If you liked Yes' peak periods, and who doesn't, you'll especially want to listen in around the six minute mark of the last track The Last Baron.  The beauty of a release like this is that, like all great progressive music, it bears fruit on repeat listenings. Every listen to a great progressive rock record from the 70's like Pink Floyd's Animals or King Crimson's Red will show you something you didn't pick up the first, second, 54th time you listened. This is the kind of record that will do that do the listener.

However, if songs about Russian fairy tale characters and astral travel will have you running to the hills, this is surely not your record. The cool thing about this release is that in an age of such homegenous sounding dribble, a band like Mastodon can push enough units to stay on tour and in the studio and out of Starbucks. This is not mainstream music, not by any stretch. Many people would be utterly perplexed by the byzantine passages of The Czar, complete with it's 2112 era Rush style suite of the Usurper/Escape/Martyr/Spiral...

Crack the Skye is really meant to take the listener on a journey. In fact, they offer the album as an instrumental on Itunes. A bold move for a bold album. This is a record custom made for a pimpy set of Bose headphones as there is a lot going on here.

If anyone's tried to listen to Dream Theater and wanted to like them but just couldn't get past the lameness then Mastodan could fill the void.