20.
Mastodon
Crack The Skye

The highest placed pure ‘metal’ album on the list this year barely made it at all, scraping in at #20. It’s an album with plenty to recommend it, with all the ferocity and technical brilliance of previous Mastodon records. The problem is that – for a band that set itself apart from the rest of the metal drones through experimentation and progression – it all sounds a little too similar to their last album, 2006’s magnificent Blood Mountain. Similar, but not quite as good: the super-long tracks are packed full of great ideas, it’s just that they’re the same ideas as last time. Mastodon still easily brush aside all other metal bands (with the possible exception of the mighty Tool, who, after all, may never make another record), and there is far too much talent in this band for anything they do to be ‘bad’ or even ‘average’: it’s their own stratospheric standards that they’re having trouble meeting here. A top twenty place is nothing to be sniffed at, of course, but given that Blood Mountain came in second in 2006 and Leviathan was sixth in 2004, I was expecting this to be better than it actually is. Grumbling aside, the amazing ‘The Czar’ is probably good enough to secure a top 20 place all by itself (it’s probably long enough to qualify as an album by itself too, at nearly 12 minutes).