mso-ansi-language:EN-US"">Generally speaking, we're not big fans of metal at The Daily Cardinal. More often than not, most of us tend to follow our indie music biases, and we stray away from anything that reaches a decibel count beyond what our sensitive ears can handle. I myself have been particularly guilty of this in the past, but I made an exception for Crack the Skye, the latest album from New Wave metal band Mastodon. I may not be the world's foremost expert on metal, so it's hard to do an honest critique of Mastodon from the viewpoint of a diehard fan. But in the greater scope of music of 2009, there were few albums I ended up putting on repeat and listening to over and over again in one sitting, and one of them was Crack the Skye.?
mso-ansi-language:EN-US"">Crack the Skye doesn't exactly reinvent the genre. It possesses all of the raging guitars, epic solos and brutal lyrics one would come to expect. But at the same time there is something incredibly accessible about the album, which is definitely a part of why it has actually enjoyed some mainstream success, even earning Mastodon a date on Letterman. So all of the metal purists out there, I apologize for not picking some obscure Norwegian black metal band that I'm sure you'll claim is 100 times better than Mastodon. But for now, I'm perfectly content with constantly spinning Crack the Skye.
