Mastodon - Leviathan


Call me Bottle. Not quite a year ago, i began a voyage into the salty sea of album reviews. Not so much to purge the spleen, but to snap me out of the drizzly late October nights of my imagination. Better than punching people in the queequeg, am i right?

But look! Have i got a Matryoshka doll of an album for you. Mastodon's Leviathan. It's their first concept album, loosely based on Moby Dick. Sea monsters and stuff. Loosely in the same sense that Uriah Heep' The Magician's Birthday Party tells a story, or that p(nmi)t and Sandra are "artists."  Loose lips sink ships, but not as impressively as albino Sperm Whales.

Melville's novel is equally loosely based on the story of the Essex, which if you're at all squeamish about ironic cannibalism, the part of American history that ran on Nantucket's whale fluid industry, the very real whale named Mocha Dick, and PR nightmares regarding race relations re said cannibalism, you should just avoid altogether. Mastodon's a boat load of wacky prog-metal graham cracker goodness by comparison. 

Melville was actually a sailor on a whaler, and his gory details about harvesting barrels and barrels of spermaceti from their heads and ambergris from their intestines, are quite accurate. Mastodon might have gotten drunk on a pontoon boat 3 or 30 times. Calm down, i adore Mastodon and they can handle my trash talk. Plus, it's a fantastic album. Granted, there's very little what you might call "singing," but Troy is more gruff than growl. This isn't death metal, it's prog.

I only bring it up because we were talking about the historical return to individualism that happened with Yacht Rock yesterday. Literary criticism pretty strongly pits Melville against Thoreau in that regard. See, not as ridiculous a non-sequiter as you thought. That comes in the form of the closing instrumental track, Joseph Merrick. Decidedly not a sea creature, but he was mistakenly called John a lot. It's still the right century, turnabout is fair play, so we're well within the standard marijuana margin for error. 

That was a lot of unpacking. Please enjoy one of my favorite albums along with me.

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