THE SKY, CRACKED
By:
April 17, 2009
IT’S TOO HEAVY METAL to be available online, but the cover story of the new Revolver is a killer. Atlanta’s Mastodon have just released their masterpiece, Crack The Skye, and the band’s dense mythological Jethro-Tull-with-plasma-cannons gobbledygook is alarmingly humanized by the piece’s revelations that
a) guitarist/screamer Brett Hinds is an irascible warlock who gets in all sorts of fights and wrote Crack The Skye’s riffs while laid up with an aggro-induced head injury, in a state of traumatic euphoria. I mean, you can just hear that, somehow…
b) the Skye of the title is Skye Dailor, sister of Mastodon’s octopoidally proficient drummer Brann Dailor. Skye committed suicide in the ‘90s, subsequent to which their mother was institutionalized — as was Dailor himself, for a time. All of this is present in the album somewhere, maintains Dailor, strained through its metal-psychedelic tropes — astral travel and the murder of Rasputin and God-knows-what. (Is that what he said? I read the interview at a magazine rack.) Totally metal, at any rate — getting at the personal via the impersonally monstrous, the domestic via the operatic, the quiet via the very very loud.
Best line from the whole thing (and this I do remember): “MASTODON IS OUR RELIGION!”
—JAMES PARKER