REVIEW

Mastodon – “Crack the Skye”

Rating: 7.5/10

Mastodon has always been a little left of center compared to other metal bands, a bit more literate and more likely to appear on a festival ticket with a bunch of wussy indie rock. That’s why the band’s transition over the past three albums from straight-up metal group with eclectic leanings to a different, more subdued beast altogether (pun explicitly intended) seems appropriate, if not entirely welcome.

On “Crack the Skye,” Mastodon has toned down the chugging, amped up the spooky, complicated arpeggios, extended the average song length and pulled the sing/growl ratio very strongly toward the former. That’s not to say that they don’t slay, they just take longer to do so. Instead of knocking you over the head with a righteous riff straight out of the box, a la “March of the Fire Ants” or “Blood and Thunder,” they are more inclined to build a mood using atmospherics and then bring the pain two or three minutes later.

Opener “Oblivion” is a good example of Mastodon’s new sound working perfectly. The slow building intro works, and the four or five choruses are sung in a sickly sweet fashion under a gut-shredding chord progression that is jarring at first listen, but wicked just the same. The two blinding solos toward the end of the track are followed with the kind of pounding riff I had been waiting for. “Divinations” and “Crack the Skye” are two more tracks where Mastodon rock in the fashion we’ve come to expect with math-jazz drumming and spiraling, otherworldly guitar figures that lead down totally unexpected paths of heaviness.

Sometimes the singing can get extremely grating, especially on “Quintessence” and the opening suites of 10-minute epic “The Czar”, where the pallid, obnoxious whining reminds me all too much of Alice in Chains junk casualty Layne Stanley’s creepy croon.

That’s not to say that these tracks and the others I haven’t mentioned don’t feature awe-inspiring, complex musicianship with clever and startling left turns throughout. I’m just saying I prefer my metal more metal and less alt-metal.

“Crack the Skye” is still pretty awesome, all things considered, yet passages like the strange session in the middle of 13-minute closer “The Last Baron” make me fear that Mastodon’s next full-length will be four-fifths jazz fusion.