Mastodon "Crack the Skye" [2009]

There's a perfectly good reason mastodons went extinct: lumbering aimlessly across the prehistoric plains with no capability to modernize themselves and without brains enough to thrive amid a changing landscape, they died off despite their gigantic size and obnoxious loud noises. As such, the term is a perfect moniker for the band Mastodon, a throwback metal band that cops every tired riff from Metallica, Black Sabbath, Jane's Addiction, et. al. and throws them haphazardly into a big, stinking heap. Taking matters even farther removed from good taste, on "Crack the Skye" Mastodon attempts, for some reason, to tell the story of a quadriplegic being sent back to the days of Rasputin in old Russia, or some such shit. Goddamn -- if they didn't already look enough like 70s wonk rockers Kansas, now they're busting out the junior high lit too? They could have skipped the pretense and simply featured a giant pair of hairy testicles for the cover art -- it would have sold pretty much the exact amount of units to women as it did in its original form. But perhaps such an aggressively stupid narrative was what the band felt it needed to set it apart from literally every rip-off metal band that ever played an all-ages show over the past 40 years. But even if you're OK with unoriginal riffs and hollers because the only thing you're concerned with is "rocking out," you could still no doubt do better than "Crack the Skye." I mean, really -- a quadriplegic? Fucking Rasputin? WTF?