Mastodon Go Intergalactic With Trippy "Oblivion" Video

Mastodon have unveiled the video for Crack the Skye's opening track "Oblivion," and — as you'd expect from a loose concept album about a paraplegic and Russian czar Rasputin facing off against Satan in outer space — the Roboshobo-directed video is similarly out there, with the members of Mastodon one by one leaving the safe confines of their spaceship to rescue their marooned bandmates.

This is the second video within the last month (following The-Dream & Kanye West's "Walkin' On the Moon") to go spacey, and "Oblivion" likewise makes plenty of use of green screens and interstellar clichés. It seems like the band went to great lengths to make space's weightlessness in the video seem real, yet while the band is floating around, their long hair and beards have somehow found a pocket of gravity that keeps them in check. Still, since there's no guarantee the clip will get played anywhere on TV other than Headbangers' Ball, it's great to see a band put so much effort and budget into a clip — even if it does borrow a bit from the scene in 2001: A Space Odyssey when the HAL-controlled robot arms kill the astronaut.

So where do Mastodon get all their crazy ideas? "It comes from taking too much acid," guitarist Brett Hinds recently admitted to Rolling Stone. The band's Brann Dailor and Troy Sanders recently stopped by the RS offices to talk about, of all things, tripping acid, but also about opening for Metallica and leading sing-alongs in Dave Grohl's bathroom.

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• Video: Mastodon Talk LSD, Iron Maiden, Singing in Dave Grohl's Bathroom
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Song Stories

“Piano Man”

Billy Joel | 1973

Billy Joel’s first hit, “Piano Man,” was – ironically – an autobiographical lament about how his first album wasn’t a hit. When Cold Spring Harbor didn’t take off, Joel briefly became a lounge pianist in Los Angeles, and this song, about that experience, expressed his frustrations and fears at the time: “And they sit at the bar and put bread in my jar/And say, ‘Man, what are you doing here?’” “It was all right,” Joel said later, about the gig. “I got free drinks and union scale, which was the first steady money I’d made in a long time.”

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