Whalecore. That’s the word that comes to mind as Mastodon take the outdoor stage at sundown, drenched in sea-blue lights with occasional splashes of blood red and flashes of fire and boomy bass frequencies. This is late July, Atlanta, Georgia’s sweltering heat, a crowd of 7,000, and a concert occasioned by the 20th anniversary of Leviathan (2004), an album the Atlanta-based quartet will perform live in its entirety, front to back. It’s the record that probably got most of us into Mastodon in the first place.
Of course, Mastodon already had the whole elephant-rock thing down with their debut LP, 2002’s Remission, one of those rare occasions where a band sounds like its name—a lumbering, prehistoric beast. But Leviathan is a whole other matter, a concept album inspired by American novelist Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851), where the songwriting draws on the monstrous mysteries of the deep and the human madness central to Melville’s narrative. Think of Leviathan as sludge metal’s answer to Dark Side of the Moon, with a few caveats.
It bears mentioning that I grew up around Atlanta, a city whose metal scene across the 1980s and 1990s was diverse and vibrant, yet scarcely acknowledged, subterranean, confined to warehouse and basement shows. Thus, the rise of a band like Mastodon from Atlanta in the early 2000s seemed so anomalous—nearly unprecedented, if not for the simultaneous emergence of sludge rock peers Kylesa and Baroness from Savannah (the state’s original capital, located four hours southeast of Atlanta). As for why these bands emerged when they did, we might imagine that all these formerly underground acts not only shared common influences but influenced and fed off one another. Otherwise, blame the heat and humidity.
Bassist Troy Sanders, the only Mastodon member originally from Atlanta, came from the Stone Mountain area, so-named for the local monolith, the largest granite formation on earth, forged from magma over 300 million years ago. At ten years of age, he strapped on his older brother’s bass, emulating Kiss’ Gene Simmons before discovering Metallica’s Cliff Burton (the pedigree for half of all Gen X metal bassists). In his pre-Mastodon days, 1993, following a gig at a Birmingham, Alabama dive bar, a fellow named Brent Hinds approached Sanders. “When you’re ready to jam with a good guitar player, let me know,” Hinds said. The two exchanged phone numbers and addresses.
Hinds arrived at Sanders’ door in Atlanta two weeks later, living out of his truck. For the next seven years, they played together in Four Hour Fogger, an experimental grindcore and sludge act that sounded like an amalgam of the Butthole Surfers, the Jesus Lizard, and Scratch Acid. Meanwhile, the other half of Mastodon, drummer Brann Dailor and guitarist Bill Kelliher played together in the mathcore-ish Lethargy out of Rochester, New York, in addition to contributing drums and bass on Today Is the Day’s In the Eyes of God (1999) for Relapse Records—an album that “scared the hell out of” Sanders, he admits (Law). By late 1999, though, Kelliher, with both of his bands dissolved, was ready to relocate to Atlanta, where his girlfriend-now-wife had moved to work for the Centers for Disease Control, persuading drummer Dailor to come with him.
The members of Mastodon met in Atlanta at a High on Fire concert at a long-gone hole-in-the-wall called Parasite House in January 2000, with Four Hour Fogger as opener, the group’s final appearance as it happens. Sanders, Hinds, Kelliher, and Dailor wasted no time, scheduling their first practice that week with no predetermined ideas of how the music would turn out. Their only guiding principle was, as a starting point, aiming for a style somewhere between Melvins and Neurosis.
Within three weeks, with nightly practices, they wrote four songs. By spring, Mastodon recruited vocalist Eric Saner, another Rochester native, recorded a nine-song demo, played Atlanta haunts such as the Earl and the Star Bar, and began touring the southeast in Sanders’ van, existing on bologna sandwiches and $100 gigs while still holding day jobs. But vocalist Saner found the instability and Mastodon’s breakneck pace too much and left the band. Rather than pause for auditions, the group remained a foursome with Sanders and Hinds now handling vocals, the former gravel-throated and the latter more reminiscent of Ozzy Osbourne in early Black Sabbath. The band then released two EPs before recording their debut LP, Remission (2002), with Relapse, a label that gained a reputation for nurturing extreme metal acts of this period.
Released in an atmosphere of post-grunge, weenie-roast rock, Remission sounds like a renunciation, a stampede, a blood rush. There is no question that with Dailor behind the drum kit, he steals the show, the percussion thunderous, unhinged. “Where the hell did these guys come from?” we wanted to know, grasping for descriptors. Sludge? Grindcore? Math metal meets Stoner rock? Over the next two years, Mastodon toured nonstop with High on Fire, Dillinger Escape Plan, and Clutch. In the summer of 2003, as Mastodon prepared to hit the European festival circuit, Dailor, who had just married in the US, began reading Melville’s opus across four legs of flights, finding himself taken in with Ahab’s relentless pursuit of the white whale. As it happens, Melville’s narrator offhandedly refers to the albino whale as “the sea-salt mastodon”, something Dailor certainly noticed.
With the group situated at a hotel bar in Belgium, Dailor coaxed his bandmates into making a conceptual album loosely based on Melville’s novel, expanding on the story’s thematic elements—hubris, madness, the unrelenting power of nature. Given Mastodon’s penchant for prehistoric beasts, sasquatches, ogres, and mad monks, one can gather that sea beasts and harpoons weren’t a difficult sell. Not to mention Ahab’s monomania as a parallel to art as obsession, to Mastodon’s own maniacal pursuits, circling the country out of a van eight months a year, willing to play anywhere.
On returning to Atlanta, the group gathered in the practice space every night for the next three months, followed by another eight weeks in the van, opening for Clutch, essentially workshopping their new material on stage. Some songs didn’t even have lyrics, so Sanders and Hinds improvised indiscernible grunts. By the time Mastodon entered Studio Litho in Seattle, producer Matt Bayles had described them as “fried”, akin to Melville’s Ahab. The whole thing could’ve gone south, the kind of record that risks becoming a punch-line. After all, for every Operation Mindcrime there’s a Kilroy Was Here.
Despite the enthusiasm surrounding Remission, Mastodon were relatively unknown when Leviathan dropped on 31 August 2004. By numerous accounts, an indeterminate number of people discovered this album when they walked into their local record store to buy the new Lamb of God record, Ashes of the Wake, released the same day and saw Leviathan right next to it. More pointedly, they saw the album cover and couldn’t help themselves. Philadelphia artist Paul Romano deserves the accolade here, rendering Melville’s colossus of the deep emerging, adorned in a Hindu-inspired crown of cobras as though an ancient sea god, capsizing Ahab and crew aboard the Pequod.
Anyone already familiar with Mastodon now heard a sludge metal band maintaining their aggressive edge while moving into more progressive territory. While songs on Remission clearly involve some complex arrangements, listeners mostly define that first LP in terms of its relentlessness and rawness. Conversations around Leviathan, however, emphasize the ambitious nature of the songwriting and the record’s thematic unity. Aside from a smattering of token metal bloggers who spent the ensuing decade pontificating on whether whalecore qualified as progressive (“It doesn’t sound like Dream Theater”), more-consolidated opinion began acknowledging Mastodon as sludgy concept metal with progressive elements in the songwriting.
At the same moment, critical voices such as Pitchfork’s Isaiah Violante and The New York Times’ Ben Ratliff now emphasized Mastodon, post-Leviathan, as “a thinking person’s metal band”, as though Mastodon’s newfound literary connections suddenly legitimated a long-maligned genre, forever deemed the music of cro-magnons. Leviathan is noteworthy in such a conversation because alongside classical and jazz, the metal genre— with its monstrous aggressiveness, instrumental mastery, and all-around bombast— exists as the genre with the capacity to render the insanity of Ahab’s doomed quest and Melville’s engagement with the awe and terror of the ocean’s inscrutable power, convincingly.
After all, metal obligates a particular ferocity that readily lends itself to songwriting that engages the overwhelming forces of the natural world. Songs across this record feature abrupt changes in tempo and intensity, percussive shuffle and swing, and frenetic passages. There’s the Wagnerian chorus of “Blood and Thunder”, followed by more atmospheric sections in songs like “Seabeast” that climb and curveball into sections more tonally abrasive, emulating Ahab’s unraveling sanity. The dynamic shifts in the music approximate nature’s capriciousness, the unpredictable movements of the sea, and the whale itself as emblematic of nature’s uncontrollable power. To boot, Mastodon seems quite comfortable exploring Ahab’s psyche, as some of the songs are “narrated” from Ahab’s point of view, the gnarled voicings on par with Ahab’s fanaticism, ultimately taking us into Ahab’s fatalistic confrontation with the whale in the near-fourteen minute “Heart’s Alive”, followed by the instrumental “Joseph Merrick” as the coda.
Remarkably, Leviathan found critical success not only in a period of upheaval for the record industry but also in which the viability of the album itself was in question. Apple launched the iTunes Music Store a year earlier, promising to turn things upside down by allowing customers to purchase songs rather than albums. With the compact disc losing influence, numerous music critics saw the writing on the wall, declaring the death of the album. In spite of such lamentation, Mastodon pulled a George Costanza and did the opposite, looking to the glory days of the record— offering a creative work reminiscent of an early Genesis record, the record as a complete musical statement, something that can’t be broken up, a form of presentation requiring mental investment from the audience. As it turns out, plenty of people prefer being in it for the long haul.
A month or so ago, Mastodon’s live performance in Atlanta featured an IMAX-like presentation, multi-paneled projection visuals, psychedelic animation, and frightening abyssal imagery—almost a Melville meets Jules Verne meets Lovecraft motif. Those visuals illustrate how Leviathan‘s success as a concept album arises from its stylistic and musical cohesiveness. Rather than compress and oversimplify Melville’s narrative into a musical Sparknotes, Mastodon allows the mythos of the sea and the struggle between humanity and beast to carry the concept.
On that humid July night, as “Blood and Thunder” concludes, bassist Sanders, windmilling his arm like Pete Townshend, rares back with his lumberjack beard and Spanish moss hair, and the band tear through the album’s first four songs without pause. Finally, we get the “glad to be here” moment. Before launching into “Iron Tusk”, Sanders steps to the mic. “For those who may not know, we are Mastodon from Atlanta, Georgia,” he says, aware that some people came for co-headliner Lamb of God. Perhaps some of these people honestly don’t know. Alternatively, Sanders, along with those of us who have been around for a while, might be savoring the moment, recognizing with a nod that, despite decades of being relegated to the cultural underground, a prominent metal band has indeed emerged from Atlanta with the ferocity of a sea monster.
CITATIONS
Sam Law. “Mastodon’s Troy Sanders: ‘We Went From Crashing on Cat-Littered Floors to Playing the Biggest Stages With All of Our Heroes’.” Kerrang. September 11, 2020.
Ben Ratliff. “Hast Seen the New Metal Album?” The New York Times. December 27, 2004.
Isaiah Violante. “Mastodon, Leviathan (Review).” Pitchfork. December 16, 2004.