Released: April 24, 2009
Can an album about astral projection, Rasputin, and a fight with the Devil say anything plain about grief? Crack the Skye spends fifty minutes working through that question. Its plot follows a paraplegic astral traveller who loses his connection to his body, passes through a wormhole, and lands inside Rasputin. The title also points to drummer Brann Dailor’s sister Skye, who died by suicide at fourteen. Mastodon had to keep all that fantasy from turning a real loss into scenery.
They begin by changing who gets heard. On “Oblivion,” Dailor sings the verses in a clean, anxious register, Troy Sanders roughens the bridge, and Brent Hinds draws out the chorus with his nasal Southern bend. Three voices pass the song between them, suggesting panic, confusion, and resignation. Brendan O’Brien’s production makes every handoff clear. The guitars remain thick, but the vocal lines have room around them, while Sanders’s bass connects Dailor’s quick kick patterns to each turn in the riff.
Mastodon still packs plenty of movement into that space. “Divinations” opens with Hinds’s banjo before snapping into a gallop, with a crooked lead cutting across the main rhythm. Dailor pushes hard underneath it while leaving the central riff easy to follow. “Quintessence” works differently. Its verse guitar circles in place, the drums keep adjusting beneath it, and the blunt “Let it go” refrain makes the cosmic language sound like someone losing control in real time.
“The Czar” crosses four named sections—“Usurper,” “Escape,” “Martyr” and “Spiral”—with each change tied to the story’s emotional direction. Rich Morris’s Mellotron and synthesizer haze hangs over Sanders’s slow opening pulse before the band locks into a broad, churning riff. The guitars later open into a long psychedelic lead, then the keyboard colour from the beginning returns. The arrangement keeps circling back to the point where escape became impossible.
“The Last Baron” stretches past thirteen minutes and follows the same sense of cause and consequence. Clean guitar figures and Hinds’s worn vocal establish the song before the full band begins shifting between open passages and tightly locked riffs. Late in the piece, a clipped low-string pattern keeps moving the apparent centre of the beat. Sanders shadows its shape while Dailor changes the accents around it. The rhythm never settles for long, mirroring a traveller who still cannot find his body.
The title track brings the personal meaning closest to the surface. Scott Kelly’s hoarse voice enters against a slow, tolling guitar figure, with Dailor answering from a much higher register. Kelly sounds earthbound. Dailor sounds as though he is trying to reach beyond him. References to Lucifer, constellations, and a departing spirit still belong to the larger narrative, though the performance leaves little room for distance. Someone is gone, and the singer wants an explanation that cannot come.
Can Crack the Skye speak plainly about grief through such an elaborate plot? Yes. The answer is there in Dailor’s exposed singing, Kelly’s entrance, the slow opening of “The Czar” and the unsettled beat beneath “The Last Baron.” The music follows a mind trying to reach someone it cannot reach, even when the story wanders through wormholes and imperial Russia. Rasputin gives that search a guide. Skye’s name gives it a reason.
Written by Rob Joncas for DeadNoteMedia.
Artist information and music courtesy of the band.
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