But it doesn't particularly matter how wound-up and excruciating the band's album concepts might be as long as their music kicks as hard as it does. Mastodon's music never really settles into a locked-in groove. Instead, it skips and dives and wanders. When the band switches up time-signatures, something it does often, it's not to show off math-rock chops; it's to rip the rug out from under you, to keep you uncomfortable.Crack the Skye, the band's fourth album, stays in weirdly soft midtempo churn mode more than their previous albums do, but it never lingers. Instead, it delays the gratification of the band's gigantic sunward-screaming choruses just long enough to make you wonder if they're ever coming, which makes the release that much more overwhelming when it finally arrives. "The Czar", a four-part, 11-minute epic that's still only thesecond-longest song on the album, gargles and fumes and lurches for nearly three minutes before launching into its first glorious steamroller riffs. This band is playing with you.
The seven songs onCrack the Skye stretch over about 50 minutes, an indulgent track-length average for any band not named Opeth. But Mastodon's odysseys never feel forced or pretentious. Even on 13-minute closer "The Last Baron", I never really notice the track length. Every riff and roar flows organically into the next until I'm totally lost in it; hard to imagine checking the time remaining on your iPod when things get like that. In a way, Mastodon operates something like prime-era Metallica, unleashing these huge, blistering tracks that journey over peaks and valleys and ditches and oceans before leaving you spinning. It's just that Mastodon's arsenal of weapons is different; instead of demi-classical guitar interludes and blazing twin-guitar leads and thuggish hey-hey-heys, they've got soupy quasi-jazz trundles and pigfuck distortion-explosions and quick bursts of time-honored Southern-rock melody.
