UPDATE: Yep, this is official. An industry insider just sent us the details. It will be 12-song CD/78 minute DVD set, featuring Crack The Skye in its entirety, plus performances of songs from Blood Mountain and Leviathan. It will also contain a live cover of ‘The Bit’ by Melvins. Get stoked!!!

Well, this is interesting. You may recall that back in 2009, Mastodon announced that they were recording their performance at Chicago, Illinois’ Aragon Ballroom, presumably for a future live release; now Interpunk.com says that release has a title, the very creative and potentially misleading Live at The Aragon, and a release date of March 15.

The thing is, as of this writing, I haven’t seen the news reported anywhere else, nor received a press release. So before we get too excited, I think we should all treat this as rumor… for now. After all, we do know that they recorded the show, so it seems not implausible that this is really happening — but it always sucks to get excited about something that turns out to be BS.

And if it is true, well… I’d love to get a Mastodon live album, ’cause Mastodon are great in concert — but I wish the recording was from virtually any other tour. See, The Aragon gig was part of the initial Crack the Skye touring cycle, when the band was playing that album in its entirety. I didn’t get to see the band on that leg of the tour, but Vince did, and he swears it was brilliant. Maybe it was… but every time I’ve seen the band perform any Crack the Skye material since, the results have been pretty disastrous.

See, as it turns out, the dudes in Mastodon are amazing musicians, and excellent screamers… and horrible singers. And it’s been my personal experience that they cannot pull the vocals from Skye off in a live setting. Listening to these dudes sing “Oblivion” in the key of Oh Christ Make it Stop will pull you right the fuck out of an otherwise brilliant performance, y’know?

So unless they’re Kiss-Alive-ing this shit and re-recording the vox in the studio — which is, needless to say, cheating — I’m kind of wary of having a live recording of any of the Skye material. (It’s worth noting that the band also played non-Skye material on this tour, too, so at the very least, we’d get SOME killer live recordings out of the whole thing.)

Of course, it’s Mastodon, and I fucking love Mastodon, so I’m totally open to being proven wrong. In fact, I would like nothing more than to be proven wrong. I have my bag of crow AND my hat right here, on a plate, ready to go.

We’ll let you know as soon as we find out if this is really goin’ down or what…

-AR