Mastodon Celebrates 10 Years of Crack the Skye
Ten years ago, Atlanta-based metal quartet Mastodon released their fourth album, Crack the Skye. The record found the group channeling their progressive influences while embracing a newfound emotional honesty. In anticipation of the album’s ten year anniversary, drummer/vocalist Brann Dailor spoke with The Marquee and reflected on the record’s impact on the band and their fans.
“I think there’s a real heart to [Crack the Skye] that people picked up on. There was a personal touch to that record that wasn’t really there before–a deep, evocative, tangible honesty that resonated with the listener. A lot of the arrangements and riffs in it were pretty crazy, and Brent [Hinds, guitar/vocals] had some of his most genius moments on those songs. I think it was the culmination of everything we’d done, everywhere we’d been. You could hear that we were reaching for a different, new plateau; we were really going for it, you know?”
Dailor admitted that the band knew that they were taking a chance with the record’s unabashedly progressive character. “When we first started playing some songs off the album for people, there was some hesitation, like ‘I dunno, it’s not brutally heavy. It’s different from your older stuff.’ Thankfully, it didn’t take long for people to see what we were doing and recognize that this was an earnest move. I feel like you can hear the authenticity in it, and it seemed that even the people who were unsure at first understood that we were following something that was sort of beyond us as well.”
That album transformed the band from an underground darling to a mainstream metal titan. Nearly a decade into their career, the group’s DIY days were officially a thing of the past. Just how much greener was the grass on the other side of the (heavy metal) fence, though?
“I’m not gonna lie to you, I pine for the ‘van days’ a little bit. There was no real pressure, no one knew who we were, no one was really expecting anything: it was just really fun. When you’re playing shows in dive bars and basements, you feel free; I think I probably had some of my best drumming moments at those kinds of shows. When you add the pressure that comes with ‘success’–the stage show, the thousands of people watching–you just think, ‘I really wanna make sure that everyone feels like they’re getting the show that they deserve, because they paid all of this money and they’re expecting something great. I have to give that to them.’”
“A lot of that pressure is self-applied,” he explained. “It’s not like anyone’s coming to the show and saying ‘Hey! You better not screw up.’ There was just something relaxed about those old shows, all of the house parties that we played. We didn’t really have any expectations about where we were headed or what we were doing. Of course, there are also plenty of aspects of the ‘van days’ that I don’t think I’d really love as a 44-year-old man. Sleeping on people’s floors. Waking up and realizing I’ve slept a little too close to the litter box. Finding my face completely covered in cat litter and possibly some cat pee. Those are the moments where I’d think ‘This is a young man’s game right here.’”
Mastodon’s success also landed them a pair of guest appearances as Wildlings-turned-White Walkers on Game of Thrones. “After our first time on the show, it came up in conversations a lot. A lot. If somebody knows about [our cameos] and they’re a big fan of GoT, the show is pretty much all they want to talk about. I think that the show’s fandom far surpasses the Mastodon fandom, and if someone’s a fan of both, they usually they just want to ask how the show will end Because they totally told a metal band with a few minutes of guest appearances the ending to this wildly successful show, right?,” he laughed.
“The second time we were on, we were filming in front of a massive green screen. We’re standing in this room and the director is just pointing at stuff and saying ‘OK you’re looking up, and the wall is coming down...and the wall is still coming down. Remember, there is a fire breathing dragon.’ Not only is nothing there in front of us, but the three of us were like ‘What? The wall is coming down?’ That wasn’t something anyone knew, so suddenly we were in the middle of a giant spoiler and the episode wasn’t going to air for several months!”
From strangers’ floors to Westeros, Mastodon has covered a lot of ground in the last decade. Crack the Skye was undeniably an integral element of that success, so the group wanted to do something special to celebrate with their fans. But what? “Troy [Sanders, bass/vocals] suggested we go out and do the album in full in a few major cities, maybe six or seven dates. But then this popped up and the timing couldn’t have been better.”
By “this,” Dailor meant “The Unheavenly Skye Tour,” the band’s upcoming co-headlining run with Coheed and Cambria (which also features raucous hardcore/punk outfit Every Time I Die).
“We’ve talked about touring together for years. I mean, we’ve talked about touring with a lot of different bands, and we’ve toured with a ton of different bands, but this is one idea that both [headlining] bands kept bringing up for several years. It’s finally happening now that the planets aligned. We’d met and hung out with those guys several times, playing the same festivals and stuff, and the parting words when we stumbled off their tour bus, or vice versa, were the same ones that every band has uttered to every other band in existence at one point or another: ‘Dude, we gotta tour together, bro!’”
When asked what he and the rest of the group were most looking forward to about playing Denver on the tour, he enthusiastically exclaimed “Beer! You have awesome beer in Denver. I love Great Divide and Avery and all of those different breweries. Oh, and TRVE Brewing. They’ve got a metal thing going on, which I really like. And I really like their sours too; I’ve got one in my fridge right now. So, that’s it: beer.”