10 years ago, my all-time favourite, most kindred musical/artistic force, @mastodonrocks, had just completed the cycle of their earth-themed record, #BloodMountain. I started keeping up with web news on their then-untitled next record. Then, the teases began. #BrannDailor talking about #Rasputin, #OtherDimensions and #Wormholes in interviews. Rumours abounded... . . . Then, all of a sudden, one overcast Sydney day in late 2008, sitting in front of a chuggy-slow laptop, I saw their website change from Blood Mountain’s earthy, red, warm, leafen tones, into a dark, purple-cyan-green, sombrely psychedelic reality-rippling pattern-scape (all created masterfully once more by @workhardened, Paul Romano). From earth, we’d launched out into space... . . . ...Even before hearing a sound, you were already snugly immersed into the quiet, darkened theatre that was to be the atmosphere of this album. And then, the words: . . . “I flew beyond the sun before it was time.” . . . Appeared, there on the front page, emblazoned in a baroque, antique, tzarist-esque mystical font. And then you heard it...a glimpse of the music itself, from the lead single ‘Oblivion’, and... it *was* Mastodon, but it was in another dimension of their identity entirely...and that was by design. . . . The band had been through some stuff. They had gone deeper this time, tapping into (and confronting/giving expression and catharsis to) some real life-stuff with this one. A darker, yet softer (yet also somehow heavier) more eclectic, melodic, and deeply emotional realm of Mastodon’s multiverse was revealed, and soon after, the title and track list was revealed: CRACK THE SKYE. Oblivion. Divinations. Quintessence. Ghost Of Karelia. Crack The Skye. The Czar. The Last Baron. A befittingly olden-time spelling of ‘Sky’, I thought. But this too, I would learn, would have an unprecedentedly profound meaning to it...and right there, I witnessed my favourite band grow up. They had taken their first major step towards becoming the truly multi-dimensional, all-of-existence-honouring souls they each are today - @creamale, @billy_butterslax, @bhinds, #TroySanders. Thank you for being who you are and doing what you do! https://www.instagram.com/p/BvcfFl3p9eE/?utm_source=ig_tumblr_share&igshid=1osnx2ukn6ztr
