Mapping the Skye

Mastodon

Mastodon's fourth full-length, Crack the Skye (out Tuesday 24) is that rare creature these days, an intricately plotted concept album that demands and rewards a start-to-finish listen. Fans will have the chance to swallow the record whole on Mastodon's upcoming tour—hitting Fillmore New York at Irving Plaza May 9 and Music Hall of Williamsburg May 10—during which the band will play Crack the Skye in its entirety. In the meantime, we offer a guide to the album's esoteric themes, featuring commentary from bassist-vocalist Troy Sanders.

The story
Mastodon's breakthrough album, 2004's Leviathan, had a pervasive maritime theme, while its 2006 follow-up, Blood Mountain, dealt with the earth. For this fifth full-length—counting Call of the Mastodon, a collection of early work—the group chose ether, the so-called fifth element, as its guiding principle. From there, the members went to work on Crack the Skye's dizzyingly elaborate narrative.
Sanders: "After Blood Mountain, we wanted to take things even further—into outer space. The story deals with a paraplegic boy who experiments with astral travel. His spirit ascends through the atmosphere and flies too close to the sun, which burns off the golden umbilical cord that keeps him connected with the material world. Then he's ripped into a wormhole and thrust into the spirit realm, where he's placed in a divination being held by the Khlysty, a Russian Orthodox sect that Rasputin was rumored to be part of. The divination is successful and the boy is placed into Rasputin's body. Rasputin journeys to St. Petersburg from Siberia, befriends the czarina and ultimately heals her son of hemophilia. But he's eventually dosed with cyanide, and the boy's spirit leaves his body, ascends through a crack in the sky and goes full circle back to earth. He's been completely healed through this journey."

The background
Lyrically, Crack the Skye draws on several harrowing real-life experiences, including the 1990 suicide of drummer Brann Dailor's teenage sister, Skye, the album's namesake. Fantasy and history also play large roles.
Sanders: "Two years ago, Brann and his wife took a vacation to Russia, and they actually followed the path that Rasputin took, all the way to the river where he eventually drowned. When he came back, he was really fascinated with those events, so that was one of the first ideas we wanted to incorporate. But then we thought, How are we going to tie that in with ether and outer space? If you can take these very different topics and make it work, it only contributes to a more bizarrely concocted story that ties in with psychedelia."

The songs
Longtime listeners will undoubtedly home in on Crack the Skye's numerous curveballs, including swirly '70s-style keyboards and swaggering, funkish grooves. But the record's signature feature is its reliance on soaring melodic vocal hooks, which replace the shrieks, growls and bellows of Mastodon's earlier work.
Sanders: "On this record, the art of songcraft was very important to us, and we spent so much time meticulously going over various arrangements. As the music was developing, we realized that we had to step up our singing and find the proper style to match each song. So that led to more of the clean vocals. It was nice to focus on that, since so many bands that we love, like Rush, Genesis and Yes, delivered clean vocals that were powerful as hell."

The cover
"The bearded men are the members of the Khlysty, who retrieve the boy's spirit in the divination."
"The rainbow deals with the sky and the atmosphere."
"The center represents the wormhole, which the boy is ripped through and ultimately taken far, far away."
"The green orbs represent the boy's spirit."
"The bear is a symbol of Russian power—it's our tip of the hat to czarist art."
"Within that circle, there's what looks like a starfish—that's representing the five elements and also tapping into the idea that this is our fifth record."
"The actual background gives a feeling of being lost in a dream world, kind of tapping into psychedelia."

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Conceptual Art >>
Proceeding chronologically from his birth year, Mastodon's Tony Sanders picks his five favorite concept records.