Heavy rock, with all its pomp and majesty, has a hardcore fan base that needs regular, quality feeding and the last album released by the band in 2006, Blood Mountain, was named the Best Heavy Metal CD by several key critics. The industry loves Mastodon. The fans love Mastodon. You get the feeling that the group does a pretty good job of loving itself.

When you think of follow-up albums to critically acclaimed titles, expectations can sometimes be placed on an unfortunate platform. Yet, there are zero worries for ’Crack The Skye’, which is as grandiose, raucous and downright heavy as it ever could be. ’Oblivion’ is a great opener, all swirling keyboards, technical drum off-beats and experimental time signatures that make even the most determined cranium-rocker reconsider his legs apart stance.

Produced by Brendan O'Brien, who has been responsible for the lighter, poppier sounds of Train and Aerosmith, you might have expected that Mastodon had made an error of judgement but you would be wrong, as despite the band’s inimitable nonconformity, the tracks run effortlessly from one heavy rock (future) classic into another.

The next track, ‘Divinations’ pinpoints the talents of Mastodon as its flexes from one extreme to the next, to deliver a weighty sound of gargantuan proportions, while ‘The Czar’, the fourth track on the album can be broken into four mini-operas that owe as much to the machinations of prog-rock as any new metal exploration. ‘Ghost Of Karelia’ is a return to the howling, yowling, high-energy that you sort of expect from this band.

Yet, the screaming and guttural basso profundo that have been a key focus of past albums seems to have been toned down most successfully, as there is a verdant richness to this album that has been hard to decipher in the past. The title track, ‘Crack The Skye’ relies a touch more on tradition, borrowing the vocal talents of Scott Kelly (of Neurosis) to support those of Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders in a bellowing roister-doister of a track. The album ends proceedings with another operatically intense ‘The Last Baron’, which builds into a crescendo and is sure to leave fans baying for more. Superior heavy rock from the masters of the genre.