Mastodon - Crack the Skye

Whoa whoa whoa whoa, we haven't listened to my favorite Mastodon album? Really? Oh, yeah, i know why. A) i never have much to say about stuff i really like, II) there's that highly uncomfortable issue of Brann's sister's less than intentional suicide (Brann himself is pretty sure she didn't realize the handful of pills would actually kill her), and Triangle) it's the Mastodon version of Rasputin. My wicked Caddyshack slice would have us debating that nasty bit of history where Lenin did a really bad job of reading Marx and somehow ended up being Jaime Lannister. I have in fact visited Lenin's Mausoleum in Red Square, i rode an overnight train from Moscow to St. Petersburg, i have actual Russian street art i watched that guy paint and patiently waited for it to dry, and bought my dad a bottle of Stolichnaya at the duty free shop on the way home.

So yeah, we'll just avoid all that and point out how frustrating it was to read 900,000 pages of Song of Ice and Fire, just to be angry when HBO out paced George "Reading Rainbow" Martin's ability to finish writing the damned thing.

Spoiler alert, in the books Tyrion kills Tywin, but  somehow that wasn't how the TV version went, and i for one gave up the ability to care anymore. Crap, now we're in murky Pearl Jam Ten territory, and some topics are just off limits.

This is their aether album. It's specifically influenced by In the Court of the Crimson King and Animals (King Crimson and Pink Floyd), Tsarist Russia, and Stephen Hawking. Doubt me? Here is the honest to actual nonsense concept, copy and pasted for you to just try to comprehend:

"There is a paraplegic and the only way that he can go anywhere is if he astral travels. He goes out of his body, into outer space and a bit like Icarus, he goes too close to the sun, burning off the golden umbilical cord that is attached to his solar plexus. So he is in outer space and he is lost, he gets sucked into a wormhole, he ends up in the spirit realm and he talks to spirits telling them that he is not really dead. So they send him to the Russian cult, they use him in a divination and they find out his problem. They decide they are going to help him. They put his soul inside Rasputin's body. Rasputin goes to usurp the czar and he is murdered. The two souls fly out of Rasputin's body through the crack in the sky(e) and Rasputin is the wise man that is trying to lead the child home to his body because his parents have discovered him by now and think that he is dead. Rasputin needs to get him back into his body before it's too late. But they end up running into the Devil along the way and the Devil tries to steal their souls and bring them down…there are some obstacles along the way."

Self explanatory, really. If i had a favorite album of all time this would probably be it. I don't, but if i did, it probably would be.