Mastodon

Over the course of the Nineties, the label “progressive metal” became increasingly identified with one particular strand: the virtuosic, bombastic sound of Dream Theater and their many imitators. With the dawn of the twenty-first century, however, new sounds and new audiences helped broaden the spectrum associated with the term, taking in diverse, hybrid styles often united by the blending of different strands of metal, blurring even the divide between extreme and melodic metal. Names like Tool, Opeth and Pain Of Salvation are now well known even outside the circle of die-hard metalheads, while others such as Sikth, Maudlin Of the Well or Devin Townsend remain largely the preserve of genre devotees. Somewhere in between sit America's Mastodon, formed in Atlanta, Georgia, right at the turn of the new millennium (January 2000). It's their second album, “Leviathan”, released in 2004 on Relapse, that turned the band into a touchstone for young listeners and musicians who, at the time, looked with equal enthusiasm to progressive rock in the traditional sense and to then-"frontier" territories like sludge metal, mathcore and metalcore.

The album opens with the granite, whip-crack riff of “Blood And Thunder”, almost immediately joined by the band's most universally revered element: Brann Dailor's tumultuous, tentacular drumming, perfectly suited to the record's maritime theme, a concept inspired by none other than Herman Melville's novel “Moby Dick”. From the outset, the track lays out several of the album's key ingredients: thrash metal guitar slashes fused with the deep, distorted blasts of the then-younger sludge sound (the tuning is dropped a full step throughout the record), hardcore punk's rhythmic fury rechanneled through constant shifts in tempo and accent, a taste for shifting atmospheres and psychedelic colouring, with passages that echo the sound of stoner metal, but also - in their scope and grandeur - the post-metal of those years.

Fuzz and tube-amp overdrive are the (barely) technological pillars of the abrasive tones dominating the lightning-fast follow-up “I Am Ahab”, two minutes and forty-five seconds presenting the point of view of the story's protagonist (or at least its human protagonist). Riddled with a hail of zigzagging riffs and recombinations in 6/8, the captain of the whaling ship Pequod gives voice to the feeling that mysteriously draws man toward the ocean, and lays out his bond - equal parts fascination and thirst for revenge - with the titanic cetacean (“mountain put at sea”) that, thirteen years earlier, tore off his leg with its sperm-whale teeth.

The style of the compositions offers very few moments to catch one's breath, which makes the opening of “Seabeast” all the more significant: arpeggiated over rather menacing extensions of an A minor chord, yet still more relaxed and atmospheric than anything heard so far. Muddier and decidedly more reliant on odd time signatures, the track is about as close to Metallica as the record ever gets, and the alternation between clean vocals and more guttural delivery (courtesy of guitarist Brent Hinds and bassist Troy Sanders, respectively) helps vary the mood at least as much as its constant, twisting rhythmic upheavals.

Far more furious are “Island” and “Iron Tusk” - both just over three minutes long. The first transports the listener to a mythic Iceland, amid eternal ice and tectonic upheaval: Thor's hammer, name-checked just before the instrumental break near the end, is rendered as an obsessive, dissonant vortex. The second, with its deep, hammering palm-muted riffs, depicts the battle with the whale instead, culminating in walls of mathcore blades - one of the album's most epic moments, helping make the track the second-most streamed song from the record on Spotify.

“Megalodon” opens once again with open, dissonant arpeggios that will certainly remind post-sludge devotees and the like of the quieter sections (and even some of the less quiet ones) of “Through Silver In Blood” or “Souls At Zero” by Neurosis, an acknowledged influence on the Atlanta band. In the largely instrumental section that follows, the thrash outbursts still find room for an improbable - but very brief and, in its own way, iconic - hillbilly interlude, separating the song's only verse from a pre-chorus that's even more relentless than what came before.

The variety of instrumental passages grows increasingly pronounced in the tracks leading up to the finale. “Naked Burn” toys from the very start with palm-muted interplay on the higher strings, picking the same baroque style back up in the bright break right after the chorus. Even more cerebral, “Aqua Dementia” marks a peak both in vocal harshness (a scream courtesy of none other than Neurosis's Scott Kelly) and in the tightness of its musical contortions. The track, like others in the tracklist, strays from the novel's narrative to imagine a future of boiling oceans and vanishing life: a kind of "retroactive prophecy" used as a device to update the novel's ecological message for the present day.

At nearly fourteen minutes, “Hearts Alive” stands in stark contrast to the brevity of the other tracks (none of which run much past four minutes), making it a true one-off on the record. Placed right in the penultimate slot of the tracklist, it's inevitably the epic climax of both the story and the album's musical arc. Few verses punctuate its largely instrumental flow: a tour de force of dynamic shifts and rhythmic about-turns depicting the drowning of the Pequod's crew, dragged under by Moby Dick during the final confrontation. Rather than dwelling on the stages of the battle, the perspective adopted is that of a sailor who, sinking to the ocean floor, replays what happened, aware he can't change it and has no hope of saving himself. Stylistically, the composition throws every arrow in the band's quiver, pairing enigmatic harmonies with bone-rattling drumming, melodic singing with snarling vocals, hints of fugue-like counterpoint, open-string let-rings, all in a whirlwind of shifting moods that mirrors the spiralling inevitability of the crew's fate. It's the album's emotional and sonic high point, the moment of synthesis that closes the circle of tragedy.

The closing track, “Joseph Merrick”, is an acoustic guitar instrumental that ends “Leviathan” on a surprising note of quiet, inspired by the figure of the famous "Elephant Man", a contemporary of Melville. This ending suggests a more intimate, meditative dimension, leaving its mark on an audience that, then as now, has found in the record a touchstone for new explorations - not just sonic, but emotional too.

“Leviathan” has had a lasting impact, influencing a new generation of musicians who, working within progressive metal, have embraced genre-blending: from Baroness to Gojira to High On Fire, a wide range of artists have inherited its sonic power and conceptual depth - and, at times, its taste for literary references. The collaboration with Scott Kelly, begun here, continued on every subsequent album, marking a creative partnership that helped define the band's sonic identity.

“Leviathan” was, and remains twenty years after its release, a beacon in the stormy waters of contemporary metal.

Ride the wave of great music

Add OndaRock to your favorite sources on Google Discover. Don't miss our reviews, milestones and latest news straight in your feed.

Follow on Google

01/09/2024