When Axl and I were in our formative years of MTV watching, Tool were the absolute undisputed kings of bad-ass music videos. Guitarist Adam Jones — a pro animator in his pre-Tool life — worked on the videos for “Sober” and “Prison Sex” with director Fred Stuhr (who also did Green Jelly’s “Three Little Pigs”), and Jones carried the torch on his own from thereon out with eye-pleasing, head-trippy gem after eye-pleasing, head-trippy gem.

In 2009 music videos certainly don’t carry the weight they used to, but whereas Tool have all but stopped releasing videos, a record deal with Warner Bros. has left the lads of Mastodon as the beneficiary of some pretty hefty video budgets, allowing the band the creative freedom to take drummer Brann Dailor’s hair-brained conceptual album schemes to their full-blown visual realizations. We had the eery, sci-fi social commentary of Blood Mountain‘s “Sleeping Giant,” the epic cave man shreddery of this year’s “Divinations,” and now this, a trippy, space-age freakout adventure for “Oblivion,” the first track from this year’s spectacular masterpiece Crack the Skye. What’s great is that — like Tool — Mastodon’s videos all share a common look and feel and all seem to tie together in some loose way. This is more than just random eye candy; it actually means something. As to whether you can or think you can parse Dailor’s actual intended meaning is another question, but again, like Tool… Mastodon keep you guessing.

-VN

After the jump, check out those “Sleeping Giant” and “Divinations” videos.

“Sleeping Giant”

“Divinations”