In June 2013, the professor and programmer Mark Sample debuted the Twitter bot @mobydickatsea. Every two hours, the account would tweet a randomly selected fragment of text from Herman Melville’s 1851 masterpiece, without context and in no predetermined order. Entries could be humorously elliptical (“swallowed down and thrown up by a whale”) or rich with accidental meaning (“the hideous rot of life should make him easier to harvest.”). The decontextualization of Melville inspired a bigger project that Sample unveiled in 2019, called An End Of Tarred Twine, for a line in Moby-Dick about a shipowner saving every scrap of sail material for future use. Like that frugal captain, Sample took every scrap of the novel and created “a procedurally generated hypertext version of Moby-Dick,” one that unfolds differently every time you read it. “Very quickly, you’re lost, reading Moby-Dick one passage at a time, out of order, with no map to guide you,” Sample wrote on his blog in 2020. “Or as Ishmael says about the birthplace of Queequeg, the location ‘is not down in any map; true places never are.'” Sample’s original bot still posts as @mobydickatsea, but in protest of Twitter’s Muskification, he’s moved it to a different platform. The fragmented Moby-Dick now appears exclusively on Mastodon.
Twenty years ago this Saturday, the Atlanta metal band Mastodon released Leviathan, their second full-length. Ostensibly a concept album based on Moby-Dick, it plays as more of an impressionistic collage than a strict retelling. As with Sample’s high-tech experiments, it would be impossible to piece together Melville’s intended narrative just by listening to Leviathan. What emerges instead is every bit as wooly and untamed as America’s greatest literary epic. Leviathan is Mastodon at their imperial best, confidently synthesizing their sludge-metal roots with their prog-rock proclivities and arena-sized ambitions, trying wild shit and sounding genuinely delighted when they pull it off. The album was greeted with immediate critical acclaim, even in 2004’s largely metal-unfriendly climate. In the years since, its legend has only grown; Leviathan regularly places in the “best metal albums of the 2000s/of the 21st century/of all time” listicles that the music press is so fond of putting together. It’s hard to find an album, post-1990, that metalheads agree on. They generally agree on Leviathan.
When I first came to Mastodon, sometime between 2002’s Remission and the release of Leviathan, I barely knew there was new heavy metal being made. My introduction to the genre was through Iron Maiden, who shoved me into a yearslong catch-up session with Priest, Sabbath, Metallica, and their ilk. I knew all the big nü metal bands that were on the radio, sure, but my changing tastes (and, admittedly, message-board peer pressure) encouraged me to dump on all that stuff. The same went for the metalcore and metalcore-adjacent acts who were spearheading what was then called the New Wave of American Heavy Metal. Compared to the real metal that was being made in the ’80s, my borrowed nostalgia convinced me, all that shit sucked. (Years later, I’m still highly selective when it comes to that generation of bands.)
Mastodon were sometimes considered a part of the NWOAHM, but they didn’t sound like Killswitch Engage or As I Lay Dying. They didn’t have the sparkling production, eager-to-please melodies, or emo-ish, cleanly sung choruses of those bands. On Remission, they sounded (and looked) like cavemen who discovered the Gibson SG before they discovered fire. When they climbed out of their morass of gnarled riffage and grunted, monosyllabic vocals, it was usually to flirt with Southern rock or soaring post-metal. Mastodon were welcomed onto big stages and Headbanger’s Ball, but I think that says as much about the confused state of mainstream metal in the early 2000s as it does about the music they were making. Whatever the hell it was, fans were responding to it. At some point, I found my way to Remission, and Leviathan quickly became the most anticipated new release of my young life.
Listening to Leviathan now, you can immediately hear what a big swing it was for the band. Everything is done with an eye toward the epic, from the instantly iconic Paul Romano cover art to the Homeric (or, fine, Melvillian) atmosphere. You can also hear why it became so gigantic. The opening riff of the first track, “Blood And Thunder” – still Mastodon’s signature song, eight albums in – is one of those magic moments of heavy metal alchemy, a sequence of notes so perfect it must have been written on the wind at the dawn of time and stumbled upon by the Mastodudes on a fortuitous acid trip. It’s just three power chords, all at the middle of the neck, with a few open notes as connectors. In its fundamental simplicity, it moves mountains. Try to hum it to yourself without proceeding, at least, to “I think that someone is trying to kill me! Infecting my blood and destroying my mind!“
“Blood And Thunder” is as close as Leviathan gets to a coherent retelling of Moby-Dick. Amid the titanic riffs and Brann Dailor’s nimble yet pummeling drum fills, co-vocalists Troy Sanders and Brent Hinds deliver lyrics about Captain Ahab’s quest to kill what the horns-up chorus memorably calls his “White whale/ Holy grail.” (That line also betrays Mastodon’s attempt at writing a metaphorical Moby-Dick, in which the holy grail is success in the music business. Personally, I’ve never found that reading of the album very satisfying.) It’s Neil Fallon, the Clutch vocalist who sings the final verse, who makes “Blood And Thunder” the most enduring song on Leviathan. He embodies Ahab, putting all the gravitas he can muster into what’s still a spine-tingling performance: “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.” I saw Fallon sing his “Blood And Thunder” guest verse with Mastodon at a Central Park SummerStage show in 2015, and the crowd lost it. It’s still one of the coolest things I’ve ever seen happen onstage.
After “Blood And Thunder,” itself a sub-four-minute belter, Leviathan keeps things tight, at least for a while. None of the first eight tracks even hit the 4:30 mark. One of the album’s great strengths is how it creates the illusion of being streamlined while jamming countless ideas into its songs. “I Am Ahab” boasts some of Dailor’s wildest work behind the kit – he’s always been more inspired by jazz and prog drummers than metal ones, and it shows here – alongside the album’s fattest groove. But it also hits thrash tempos and drops a huge, triumphant guitar melody at its midpoint. “Seabeast” is a ballad, sort of, which showcases the improved clean vocals of Sanders and Hinds; it’s followed by “Ísland,” which nods to the band’s sludgy origins with a filthy, almost death metal-ish side quest. (It’s here that the lyrics, thrillingly, start to go off the rails: Captain Ahab didn’t sail to Iceland to claim Odin’s spear and Thor’s hammer, but Mastodon do.) “Iron Tusk” is the album’s one straight-up ripper, and the underrated trifecta of “Megalodon,” “Naked Burn,” and “Aqua Dementia” lets things get truly and gloriously weird. The Skynyrd-fried lick that gives way to the breakneck thrash riff on “Megalodon”? Dude, don’t get me started.
We’re here to talk about “Hearts Alive,” though. At a walloping 13 minutes and 39 seconds, it’s the longest song in the Mastodon catalog, the crown jewel of their grandest epic. It’s also the best song they’ve ever written. Even a Moby-Dick as psychedelic as the one presented on Leviathan has to end with a confrontation between Ahab and the whale, and that’s what “Hearts Alive” delivers. After a twinkling introductory passage that bobs along the waves of Dailor’s rolling patterns, a hard-charging riffs kicks off the final battle. What happens after that first big riff dissipates is what makes the song so interesting. A metal band depicting the clash between a mad mariner and a massive, unfeeling beast might be expected to lean into the violence of it. Mastodon make it sound existential, almost melancholic: “Time and space, all alone/ It can be a lonely place/There it goes, opening up/ I can’t stand, I can’t breathe.”
Like most of the best side-long rock songs, “Hearts Alive” is made up of distinct movements. In a contemporary interview (that I’m unfortunately having a hard time tracking down two decades later), I remember the band talking about how it began life as two separate songs. Once they started mixing the parts together, it became obvious that they were supposed to be united as one. That means “Hearts Alive” feels alive and ever-shifting, even as it works its hypnotic spell. Riffs come and go; the mood continuously shifts as the battle unfolds. As was inevitable from the opening chords, Ahab is ultimately brought low — by his monomaniacal obsession, by Moby-Dick himself, maybe even by his own melancholy. The guitar solos that Hinds and Bill Kelliher trade as the song climaxes seem to ferry the song off to the next port as the Pequod sinks to the ocean floor, Ahab and crew still aboard. The gorgeous and rarely mentioned instrumental “Joseph Merrick” plays as the credits roll.
It’s difficult now to pinpoint the lasting influence of Leviathan. In its immediate wake, peers from the Georgia sludge scene like Baroness and Kylesa were pushed to make their own thorny, complex records of forward-thinking music. Gojira made their own prog-metal concept album with a whale on the cover the very next year, and they just played the Olympics. The German bands Ahab and the Ocean Collective have taken inspiration from Leviathan’s nautical themes and proggy ambitions, but their sounds have veered off in disparate directions over the years. Mastodon themselves only stayed on the track that Leviathan laid down for a couple more albums, eventually making their way to a sleeker hard rock sound. (They’ve still never charted on the Hot 100, but it’s become common to encounter their later music on terrestrial rock radio.) Mainstream metal today doesn’t sound much like Leviathan; it doesn’t sound much like metal at all, per our own Eli Enis. Metal bands still take the kinds of big swings that Mastodon took with their second album, but they tend to take them on an underground scale, knowing they’re not going to be headlining arenas with prog songs about 19th century literature.
Leviathan is too singular to be ripped off well, anyway. It can only be experienced on its own terms, and after 20 years, it still sounds as bold, challenging, and idiosyncratic as it did when I first brought it home from FYE. Its influence might not be written all over the modern metal landscape, but that just makes it feel even more precious. It is not down in any map; true places never are.
