Here we are with another A Gift to Artwork post and the final piece of our four-part journey into Mastodon’s brilliant fourth album Crack the Skye. We’re going to assume that you already have a firm grasp of the album’s concept here, so if you don’t, go ahead and bring yourself up to speed by reading our *prognotes from earlier on in the week. Now let’s get right into it! 90s Hip Hop Drum Kit. The element of ether plays a large role in the album’s concept, and so it should come as no surprise to see it well represented within the artwork. On the cover of Mastodon’s first three albums the word Mastodon is crowned by a symbol of that record’s element: Remission had a flame/torch to represent fire, Leviathan had a crashing wave to represent water, and Blood Mountain had a pair of hands cupping a seed to represent earth. Yet here, on the last of their albums to represent an element (to date), we see a combination of all four symbols: the band’s name is flanked by flames, it’s topped with the seed and crashing waves, and it features a black hole, representing ether, below.

Thus the band are boldly declaring that this is their best work yet, that this is the culmination of their history, the point at which everything comes together. Looking more closely at ether’s symbol alone, one can see that the image of the black hole perfectly matches the design of the (literal) black hole serving as the cover’s centrepiece. The inclusion of the same symbol twice clearly signifies the importance of its symbolism to the album, namely its embodiment of the void, emptiness, hopelessness and the unknown, all omnipresent themes within the record’s lyrics and story lines.

More than that our protagonist’s soul, having been severed from its body whilst experimenting with astral travel, is sucked into a black hole, adding another link between the image and the album itself. Contrasting the two black holes against each other, we can see that the central one is black, whilst the smaller symbol above is in gold, suggesting that the heaviness of their previous albums, whilst not disappearing, is slowly making way for some lighter, more melodic and more progressive material. When studying the golden symbol in more detail, we can see that just below the black hole there appears to be a tear drop, representing the intense sadness and depression that Brann would’ve felt following the death of his sister. Furthermore its placement directly opposite the seed, which is of a similar shape, highlights that this record’s element (ether) is the complete opposite of the previous element (earth). When looking at the symbol as a whole, both the black hole and the symbols immediately adjacent to it form the outline of a trident.