MASTODON: CRACK THE SKYE PDF, EPUB, EBOOK Addi Booth,David Stocker | 104 pages | 21 Sep 2009 | Hal Leonard Corporation | 9781423480440 | English | Milwaukee, United States MASTODON Crack the Skye reviews They've spent the time to get the compositions right, make the instruments sound great, nail the vocal takes. While the production is very modern, Crack the Skye doesn't sound micro-corrected to death at all. It maintains a live intensity and fire, a vibrant looseness that the best studio albums capture. Four of the seven tracks are truly great songs, and the remaining three are good. Not quite a masterpiece, but an excellent piece of work, one of the better offerings of the year. The vocals remind me of a cross between Ozzy and Layne Staley. I just can't get into this track. It actually opens with banjo. Yes banjo. A nice heavy sound follows and the drumming is fantstic! The vocals are better too. A good uptempo song. I can't get past this plus it's too commercial sounding. It opens with bass-synths and stays fairly restrained until before 4 minutes when it kicks in. Great sound! Impressive guitar throughout this one. A good heavy track with some cool sounding guitar playing over top at times. He trades vocals with Brent throughout. Another killer tune. It opens with acoustic guitar as vocals and a heavy sound take over quickly. This sounds really good. A change in style after 3 minutes. An outstanding rhythm follows. The other songs are really excellent. I just can't give 4 stars to an album when I dislike that much of it no matter how outstanding the rest is. First, the vocals. I was never a huge fan of Mastodon's vocals on their first 2 albums, but I am not fond of these at all. To be honest I am not sure who is singing when on each song since 3 people are contributing vocals, including the drummer!? I some of the harsher vocals, it fits the music well. However, most of the clean singing, well just most of the singing I can not stand. It really distracts me from much of the music. Second, the music is flat out boring. Most of the solos on the album are pretty good, and I do like some of the riffs but I just can not seem to sit through a full song. I like certain parts of certain songs, but not a single one all the way through. Besides the vocals, which I already mentioned, I can not put my finger on what exactly is wrong with the music. Perhaps the band progressed too much? Even when a band, such as Death moves into uncharted territory for themselves, they must retain what they are. What disappoints me most is the drumming. It is good, and you can hear traces of Brann, but this is not the drumming I have grown to love, and expect from Mastodon. I fully admit I am a metal head at heart, and while I have grown to love most of Prog-Metal, the metal still has to be there. Maybe this album is simply too progressive for me, perhaps they have reached a sound beyond my grasp. Whatever the reason I can not listen to "Crack the Skye". This really upsets me because some of the music is really great, and the lyrics and overall concept are brilliant. I would say this is for fans only, but I am long time Mastodon fan and I can not do this album. Therefore, by this sites guidelines I am compelled to give "Crack the Skye" a rating of 1 star. With three cult albums at their back and a major label backing them it's actually something of a surprise that Crack The Skye is Mastodon's most 'progressive' album to date. A lot of core fans have said that the album takes the band and veers them too near typical 'alt-metal' territory, but if the changes be braved, this is an incredible ride that can be listened to on repeat if need be And need be. The album is constructed out of a number of mid-lengthed and longer numbers - and being that Mastodon has always succeeded at both on previous albums, this seems like a natural progression for them. While the songs on the album don't necessarily need to be long to be impressive, there's still a couple of "epics" to balance out the shorter songs on the album - One for every three short songs, so it seems. But even the short songs seem to have matured from the band's old Remission days, when songs like Mothr Puncher and Blood And Thunder where the standard. Things kick off to a roaring start with the frightening chords of Oblivion that soon turn into a godly riff and an introduction of the band's new style. While their obvious Extreme Progressive Metal qualities are all still in tact, it seems that the band has torn a page out of Black Sabbath 's book especially in terms of the secondary vocals and added a certain amount of 'doom' to their songs. This makes things seem a lot less chaotic than their older albums which some fans may miss , but is ultimately the best step that the band could have taken for the direction of their music. From here things only get better. The first single for the album, Divinations , is truly a sight to behold as it gets into gear with even more rocking riffs and some intense vocals that only add to the mix. Quintessence is another song that continues the shorter tune's opening trio of barrage metal, blending with the first two to create what almost turns into a suite. On the second half of the album the short songs continue to rock, although getting a lot less immediately accessible as they go. Ghost Of Karelia is another brooding tune with a lot of atmosphere while the title track, Crack The Skye is a catastrophic sounding song that has the desperate vocals trying to keep up with the increasingly dramatic instrumental section. Excellently done. Of course, this isn't taking into account the two most impressive pieces on the album. The long songs really steal the show here, and while it is pretty typical of a progressive rock journalist to publish this obligatory, perhaps , it's still truly impressive that a band of Mastodon's caliber, signed to a record label like Warner Bros, is capable of pulling off such opuses without creative impediment or compromise. The Czar , clocking at just over minutes, is easily the album's peak, combining amazing vocal lines and time changes with air-guitar-worthy riffs and metal sections. It's hard not to be impressed or feel the shivers run down your spine at the call of, ''By the light of the moon, you must escape into the deep black of the night, fight the devil inside''. The Last Baron is also impressive, if perhaps a little bit more relaxed than its predecessor, doing exactly the same things to a slightly different formula? All in all an amazing album, which has stolen this reviewer's heart for pick of the litter for It's going to be a tough disc to beat, especially 6 months into the year already. Competitors may still exist, but this one is definitely a must. If you're a Mastodon fan then prepare yourself for a little more polish, and if you've never liked anything released by the band to this point then I still encourage that you give the album a shot, you'll be happily surprised. Before listening to 'Crack The Skye,' I could safely say that Mastodon was certainly not 'my cup of tea. While I am still not wholly convinced that the band is right for me, I can safely say that 'Crack The Skye' is a brilliant album, and despite being critically hailed as a bit more than it cuts out to be, a nice dose of a brand of progressive metal much unlike the more European- styled sounds of Dream Theater or Symphony X. With 'Crack The Skye,' Mastodon craft a very dense soundscape, which at times is very easily likened to psychedelia. There is also a fair metallic dosage here, although it's not near as brutal or heavy as alot of music lodged into the 'extreme prog metal' realm. If Mastodon has anything going for them, it's that they sound very original in contrast to their other prog-metal contemporaries. It could be well-said that a substantial portion of modern progressive metal bands default to sounding like carbon copies of Dream Theater or Symphony X at the earliest behest. Mastodon -on the other hand- looks back to the band's geographical roots the band hails from Georgia, in the heart of the American southland and instead of typical prog-rock influence, uses Southern rock as the main external voice to the sound of the band While I have never been able to appreciate Southern rock too much in the grand scheme of things, it's very fresh to see this melded with progressive metal. The instrumentation in the album is fantastic. There is some great riffage here; the riff at the chorus of 'Divinations' in particular works very well in the sense that it is both progressive and complimentary to the song's spirit. The album's or the band's, I should say main fault seems to lie with the vocals themselves.