Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Mastodon
Label: Relapse Records
Release date: 2004
Running time: 46:58
Rating: 4.9/5
Leviathan, one of the biblical sea monsters and one of the seven princes of Hell, guardian of the very mouth of hell’s flames and the gates of the unholy kingdom, is a solid foundation for the mental upgrade of the sweet cycle of metal-prog forefathers Mastodon. Just two years after the incredible surprise of a record, Remission, it’s time for a fresh dose of thunder and meticulously executed beatdowns for listeners who suspect nothing. The Leviathan Mastodon reach for is closer to the epic reality of Melville’s Moby Dick, the giant white whale through which the eternal struggle of man against the misunderstood, the mysterious and the essentially natural is painted. The fiery flames of the debut get a concrete counterpart, though sonically it doesn’t stray too far from the recently begun musical cycle of megalomaniac, unimaginably vast stomping.
With Leviathan, Mastodon more than confirm that there’s a lot more behind their creative process than just a string of bare coincidences or aesthetic play with rhythm and sound. Mastodon zero in on the damp, hellishly crushing element of dark water. The recipe is once again, let’s put it this way, pretty simple: on one side you’ve got the lucid post-HC avant-garde stance of avant-garde metal, which can’t and doesn’t want to shake off its saturated jazz vocabulary, complex rhythms and the busting of the formal limits usual for metal. Mastodon went for distinctiveness right from the start, and the amalgam of layered musical coexistence between genres rarely combined until then becomes a steel oratorio for all further mental excursions, leaving an indelible mark on the musical vocabulary of a wide range of later bands that picked Mastodon as their primary point of reference.
The trip through the murky world of unexplored, mysterious depths begins with piecing together a mosaic of torn-up lyrics, which, unlike the stripped-down aesthetic of the guttural singing on the debut, are delivered more melodically this time. If Remission with its rather dry production stirred up a fairly strong sense of claustrophobia, this time you can more easily give yourself over to the flow of a less nightmarish and suffocating weight of fat sounds and deliberately slowed-down waves of rhythm. The horizons open up so you can more easily swim up to the surface of a churning, stormy ocean and scream out your cries of terror and fatalistic surrender to fate. Producer wizard Matt Bayles, with his already proven approach, tailors the underground voice of metal’s avant-garde to the taste of a slightly larger musical community, and this rather unorthodox musical experiment slowly begins to seep through a thousand pores into musical consciousness and the mainstream.
The overture to this more carefree enjoyment kicks off with an incredible duet between Troy Sanders and the head preacher of Clutch, Neil Fallon, who puts the final cherry on top of the record’s first single, Blood And Thunder. “Split your lungs with blood and thunder / When you see the white whale / Break your backs and crack your oars men / If you wish to prevail” conjures up the battlefield of Ahab and the mysterious white whale from Moby Dick. The final showdown starts right away, with the sea surface foaming and bubbling in the fight between man and the extreme form of nature. Obsession, agony, and a story that’s been told plenty of times but never sung like this, about madness, single-minded mission and the sense of the lonely, deranged Captain Ahab, continues in the song I Am Ahab. The main players in the hellish showdown are introduced, and the elusive beast reveals itself in one of the record’s most melodic moments, an epic rich in vocabulary and meaning, Seabeast. “There’s an open wound placed upon my heart in anger’s rage / If we open up a spirit, a spirit that can bleed / Ahab the leading lad we can trust his obsession carries them / Meet us at the temple healing all the crippled” is a lyric that slowly fills your ears and, with a melody of pain and seeming lightness, explains the backstory of the whole tale. That’s also when you can grasp the madness and the drive past the limits of the possible in the raging oratorio of Iron Tusk, let’s call it the record’s second big moment, if you’re hungry for hits. The sludgy roar of a dirty Sabbath-style sound recreates a new circle of watery hell. Myths and legends fill the freshly written pages with a deficit of strength and superhuman abilities in the gifted human. Intellect as the main weapon and hidden trump card of evolutionary supremacy barely holds its own against the megalomaniac creatures of Mother Nature. The impression of full-blown storytelling is complemented by a phenomenal feel for creating and writing music. There are twists and resolutions aplenty. Megalodon, for example, quite unexpectedly drifts off into realms of melodically twangy Southern rock, only to launch itself at your heart at a thundering stampede a moment later and eat its way to the center of your soul. Harmony and dissonance are complementary sides of subduing every listener who dares to stare into the dark depths. The next big duet announces itself with a tangled intro of fingers weaving on the guitar neck, which organically and with seeming ease fill the gaps in the rhythmic lacework of drumming demigod Brann Dailor. What follows is a guttural vocal showdown between two giants of modern metal singing: the already established thunderer Troy Sanders and Scott Kelly, vocalist of the legendary Neurosis, in the song Aqua Dementia. “The sun had fallen / Boiling the water where the hydra’s crawling / The righteous go in blazing fury / And we cleanse the earth to bring it down / Bring it down / And God will watch it burn / Releasing souls / Within the wrath we wait / To be dirt again / There is a flame I lit / I upon high” roars mightily, as if Poseidon himself were carrying it from the depths of the sea up into the sky. Only two more moments remain until the final showdown between Ahab and the white whale that we all know. Hearts stop beating and the bodies sink. Then comes one last moment of seeming calm with the song Joseph Merrick, which soothes and settles you a little after the agony and the fight. The second act of this epic listening experience is done, and the sea foam gently dissolves on the sandy shores of an undefined future.
As said, Mastodon have once again surpassed even the deepest expectations and written one of the most beautiful chapters of their musical output, in letters that, with only the noblest sheen, can stand up to the aesthetic foundation of an incredible, grandiose conceptual construct. If not before, with Leviathan Mastodon confirmed their primacy as bearers and guardians of the holy grail of musical art. If with exceptional musicians like Isis you got the feeling that, in their eternal and rather simple repetition of the same riffs, they unwittingly underestimate your musical intellect, this time you get a quality alternative in the rich, baroque-furrowed sound of the Atlanta four-piece Mastodon. The sophisticated execution simply forces you to follow the output of the Sanders – Hines – Kelliher – Dailor lineup in the future too, because without it there’s no peace for your restless soul, now hungry for further excursions into the unknown! A new millennium of metal has arrived, and in this new millennium it’s Mastodon who can save you and sate your hunger. Thank the gods for miracles like Leviathan and messiahs like Mastodon!
Lineup
Troy Sanders – bass, vocals
Brent Hinds – guitar, vocals
Bill Kelliher – guitar
Brann Dailor – drums
Guest musicians:
Scott Kelly (Neurosis) – backing vocals on Aqua Dementia
Neil Fallon (Clutch) – backing vocals on Blood and Thunder
Matt Bayles – organ on Joseph Merrick
Phil Peterson – cello on Aqua Dementia
Production
Matt Bayles & Mastodon
Track list
1. Blood and Thunder (Feat. Neil Fallon)
2. I Am Ahab
3. Seabeast
4. Island
5. Iron Tusk
6. Megalodon
7. Naked Burn
8. Aqua Dementia (Feat. Scott Kelly)
9. Hearts Alive
10. Joseph Merrick
