With Leviathan, Mastodon helped usher in a golden age of heavy metal

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The internet outrage machine briefly focused on Mastodon in October 2014, following the music video release for “The Motherload,” the fourth and final single off its most recent album, Once More Round The Sun. In it, an innocuously bland metal tableau of solemn white men straining under immense literal and figurative weights is interrupted by a voluptuous, twerking dance troupe, most of whom are black. Outlets decried what they considered a hard rock sexist minstrel show, with the musicians skewering minority culture under the guise of cheekiness, no pun intended. Band members, even one of the dancers, quickly responded to the critiques as online commenters pummeled each other, and eventually outrage culture set its sights on the next clickbait target. But during the short-lived discussion, few if any observed the strangeness of a metal band eliciting the same racial and gender pop-theory think pieces that, say, Taylor Swift’s “Shake It Off” generated only two months prior.
The heavy-metal genre is arguably more wide-reaching than ever, and owes both its recent success and scrutiny largely to Mastodon’s second full-length, Leviathan. Released almost exactly a decade before “The Motherload” controversy, critics and fans immediately hailed the work as an instant classic, and it wasn’t long before the album’s popularity ushered in a new golden age for the subculture. Mastodon garnered a decent amount of acclaim for its 2002 debut, Remission, but it was Leviathan’s perfected grandiosity and accessibility that crowned it as heavy-metal royalty. The opening track, “Blood And Thunder,” features a hook now as ubiquitous within the scene as any Slayer or Metallica riff, and is arguably the best example of early Mastodon’s bluesy influences (referred to by some as its signature “deedily-deedily-doo” sound). The full band kicks in, and Troy Sanders’ raspy growl soon declares, “I think that someone’s trying to kill me,” setting up the themes of paranoia and obsession frequented by countless metal acts, but it’s when the chorus hits (“White whale / Holy Grail”) that listeners get their first true hint about what Mastodon plans on tackling for the next 45 minutes.
America was still retching up the last of its late ’90s and early ’00s aggro rap-rock and nü-metal bile prior to Leviathan. It had only been five years since acts like Korn and Limp Bizkit soundtracked a mob of thousands as they pillaged the sun-bleached ruins of Woodstock ’99. The week of Leviathan’s release, Billboard’s No. 1 alternative song (there was no hard rock or metal charting at the time) was “Breaking The Habit” by Linkin Park. While Mastodon’s album peaked at No. 139, it received nearly unanimous positive acclaim for obvious reasons. No longer would metalheads need to wade through the likes of Fred Durst extolling the desire to “break your fucking face tonight”; they now had this new band of upstarts from Atlanta, gifting them an ass-kicking, bone-rattling thrasher of a Moby Dick concept album.
Leviathan is a heavy metal epic that somehow manages to remain self-aware sans pretension, with gargantuan music that balances its literary message. Over half the tracks draw direct parallels to Melville’s masterpiece, with the remaining songs referencing the tome either sonically or tonally. Grandiose concept records are nothing new, especially in a genre with such a fondness for the dramatic, but Mastodon tackles this American literary monument with a scorching ferocity that is a natural fit for a tale of madness, death, majesty, and revenge.
“There’s magic in the water that attracts all men / Across hills and down streams,” Sanders roars at the first verse’s start of “I Am Ahab.” The delivery makes it easy to imagine the bassist and lead vocalist standing at the front of a ship’s prow, himself an Ahab, shouting into the sea. In interviews, it’s also a portrait that doesn’t seem too far off-course to the band itself.
“I kinda used Mad Ahab as us being obsessed with playing music and potentially going down with the whale or whatever,” drummer Brann Dailor explained shortly before the album’s release in a 2004 interview with the now-defunct metal publication Chronicles Of Chaos. “Playing music and touring being such an obsession, and just kind of like such a shaky ground ’cause it’s heavy metal music… I mean, we’re all like 30 years old and it’s quite possibly, almost definitely, gonna take you nowhere, you know what I mean?”