A Tribute To Mastodon’s ‘Leviathan’, The Best And Boldest Metal Record Ever

The year was 2003, and heavy metal act Mastodon were — by their own admission — chasing an impossible dream.

The Atlanta, Georgia four-piece had all met a few years before, when drummer Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher — emigres from New York — bumped into the other two members, bassist Troy Sanders and guitarist Brent Hinds, at a High on Fire show.

Despite their disparate backgrounds, the strangers soon discovered they had a lot in common, most notably a presiding love of both sludge metal, especially experimental icons like Neurosis and Melvins, and the clean, technical showboating of Thin Lizzy.

Indeed, that combination of the messy with the anthemic dominated their early output as a band. A demo dropped in 2000; a 7-inch shortly after that; and a full-length, the gnarled Remission in 2002. Combining short, punchy choruses with bleached white guitar lines, songs like ‘March of the Fire Ants’ were innovative enough to garner immediate praise. Pitchfork, those snobby tastemakers, gave the band’s debut a thumbs up, and the song ‘Crusher Destroyer’ ended up on the soundtrack for a Tony Hawk game within a year, branding Mastodon as a band on the rise.

But despite all that, the band’s future seemed unwritten. Lugging around his gear on tour, Dailor never quite managed to convince himself that a career in metal was sustainable. “Touring [was] such an obsession,” he later explained in an interview. “But it was just kind of like such a shaky ground, ’cause it’s heavy metal music. I mean [we were] all like 30 years old and metal was quite possibly, almost definitely, gonna take you nowhere, you know what I mean?”

Facing impossible odds, driven by a near maniacal desire to succeed, Dailor began to see parallels between the fate of his band and the book he was reading on tour, Herman Melville’s Moby Dick. The white whale was the audience, an elusive, perhaps terrifying goal that had to be approached with caution. And his band were Ahab — single-minded, in various states of disrepair, mad as a sack of frogs.

So, while on tour in London, Dailor made his big pitch to the band. Their second album should be a quasi-concept record, based around Moby Dick. “I was looking up all these passages and reading them to the guys,” Dailor would later explain. It seemed fated that Moby Dick should be their next project. After all, as Dailor himself pointed out, the white wale has a nickname used throughout the novel — the “sea-salt mastodon.”

The band were sold. And so they got to work making their masterpiece, Leviathan, one of the greatest metal albums ever written, and a turning point for the genre.

Screams And Salt Water

Putting Leviathan together felt like a blessed creative time for the band. They wrote the whole thing in about three months, meeting up each night after hours spent at their day job to craft songs about determination and pain. It was fun. “We were in the practice space every single night,” Dailor explained. “It came together pretty easily.”

With the album mostly assembled, the band began road-testing it. They spent two months on the road with Maryland’s metal heroes Clutch, and they’d sneak unfinished Leviathan songs into each set. “A lot of the songs didn’t even have lyrics,” Dailor later revealed. Instead of singing words, vocalists Hinds and Sanders were just letting out long, cracked bellows.

By the time they were ready to record, the band were feeling “pretty fried”, burnt out from weeks on the road. But they also knew the songs inside out. By then, the record was done. It was just a question of laying it to tape.

And yet despite the obvious strength of the material, there was some concern from the record label that the album was too marked a change from the Mastodon people were used to. Whereas Remission had been long and broody, Leviathan‘s pleasures were immediate. The first two songs, ‘Blood and Thunder’ and ‘I Am Ahab’ are relentless, packing more invention and ambition into six minutes than most metal acts had managed over the course of their entire career.

Even the record’s “quiet moments” are noxious and intense. ‘Hearts Alive’, the album’s penultimate track, snakes over 13 long minutes. But rather than a mood-piece, it thrums with the hideous energy of a typhoon, building to a Neurosis-like climax that eventually collapses under its own sagging weight.

Panicked, the PR released ‘Iron Tusk’ as the first single, convinced that it would be the best way to appease Mastodon diehards. They needn’t have worried, of course. Upon release, Leviathan was heralded as a monumental work, not only by the band’s pre-existing fanbase, but by the metal community at large. Reviews were glowing; sales were astronomical.

Ironically, by making a record about the elusive nature of success, Dailor and the band had cemented themselves as one of the mainstays of the genre for decades to come. Not every band has one record that seals their place in the canon. But that’s what Leviathan was for Mastodon.

Leviathan Remains Undefeated

In the 16 years since the album was first released, that reputation has only grown. Leviathan regularly tops “best ever metal albums” lists — it came second in Music Junkee‘s own ranking — and it is still talked about with a kind of hushed reverence.

And yet somehow, despite those plaudits, Leviathan feels almost underrated. We do not often enough take stock of how much a risk a concept record about whaling was, and how well it paid off, or the sheer impact that the album had on pretty much every sludge metal act that preceded it.

To stick with aquatic metaphors, Leviathan is like Jaws. Just as anyone who ever makes a shark film will now be in conversation with Steven Spielberg’s classic, so too must anyone attempting to mount a metal concept record pay heed to Mastodon’s formula-making work, one way or the other. It is a kind of creative final word, an entire statement of self, shoved into song. You might hate it. But you can’t ignore it.

A decade and a half later, finding somewhere quiet, settling in, and blaring Leviathan remains one of life’s most exquisite pleasures.

That’s mostly thanks to the skill with which Mastodon span different tones, styles and genres. You’d never call Leviathan anything but sludge-inspired, and yet there’s so much other stuff thrown into the mix — fleeting snatches of Thin Lizzy-style guitars; terrible, mounting horror brushing up against moments of musical levity; a pulsing, complex narrative that now and then simply fades into the background, and lets the drumlines do the talking.

That’s the thing: the record is ambitious, above anything else. It never stays still. Instead of trying out one or two audacious ideas a song, Leviathan tries out a dozen — even ‘Joseph Merrick’, the album’s instrumental closer, whips over the surface of your mind like a loose cable on the surface of a ship. It’s inventive, and intelligent, and it never, ever settles for less. How many other records can you say that about? Hell, how many ever works of art can you say that about?

In the hours after Leviathan was completed, the members of Mastodon sat out in their record label’s parking lot, drinking beer and listening to the album over and over again. A decade and a half later, finding somewhere quiet, settling in, and blaring Leviathan remains one of life’s most exquisite pleasures — an opportunity to spend a little time in the company of a masterpiece.

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Joseph Earp is a staff writer at Junkee. He tweets @JosephOEarp.