Trampled under foot

For Mastodon, heavy is as heavy does

By Newt Briggs

It happens after every Mastodon show: A scowling metalhead, his hair close-cropped, a sleeve of tattoos creeping down his arm, furrows his brow as he attempts to describe Mastodon's sound. He reaches back into his brain--clouded by too many bong hits and too many hours playing Doom 3--but all he can conjure from the lifeless organ is, "Dude, they're heavy as...fuck."

Perhaps, muses the more lucid mind, but how heavy is that? Is it as heavy as those twin brothers on the motorcycles in the Guinness Book of World Records? Is it as heavy as a black hole? Is it as heavy as guilt?

It's all that and then some, and semantic wrangling aside, Mastodon is indeed heavy as fuck. Like its prehistoric namesake, the band lurches across the heavy metal landscape, grinding poseurs and wannabes to a grisly pulp with its massive stoner-core riffs. If Black Sabbath's revolution was to slow rock down until it liquefied into a viscous sludge, then Mastodon's is to charge through the muck full barrel, kicking up shit and slime with each thundering footfall.

Ironically, the inspiration for Mastodon's new album comes not from the land, but from the sea. Based on Herman Melville's classic novel Moby Dick, Leviathan borrows whole passages from the book, incorporating them into songs such as "Blood and Thunder," "I Am Ahab" and "Seabeast." According to Mastodon guitarist Bill Kelliher, the Moby Dick connection had its roots in a hellish airplane odyssey undertaken by drummer Brann Dailor. Basically, the roundabout journey took Dailor from Atlanta to Hawaii (so he could get married) and then back across two oceans to London (so he could join the band for a European tour). The whole trip was such a nightmare that even Kelliher can recount the itinerary.

"Brann flew from Atlanta to Las Vegas to California to Hawaii, got married, and then turned around and flew through Chicago and Philly back to Atlanta," Kelliher says. "Then he flew back up to Philly, on to Iceland and then down to the U.K., where he met up with us."

Besides the marriage, the only good thing that came out of the self-imposed pilgrimage was that Dailor, who didn't sleep for the entire trip, had time to read Melville's novel in its entirety. The book hooked him from the second page, when it referred to the infamous white whale as the "salt-sea mastodon."

"When Brann finally got to London, he was absolutely out of his mind," says Kelliher. "He'd been up for three days straight, and somewhere along the line he'd come to the conclusion that the story was metaphorically about us. I mean, Captain Ahab is this crazy dude who gets all of these people together, and they jump on a boat to go in search of Moby Dick. Like, even if they die doing it, they know they've got to fucking try anyway. I think you can look at our band in the same way. We have this white van that we all jump into and sacrifice our lives and our families and our friends back home to go on this quest for the rock."

Judging by the sheaves of critical praise that have been heaped on the band, their quest has not been in vain. Playing shows with everyone from Queens of the Stone Age to Cannibal Corpse to Fear Factory, Mastodon has been cracking skulls around the globe ever since the release of 2002's Remission. Kelliher says that at a recent show in Rochester, N.Y., the band even sold more merch than Fear Factory--a considerable achievement considering the latter's headliner status.

No doubt a large part of Mastodon's appeal comes from its propensity for switching tempos, pummeling its audience and then backing off and then pummeling them some more. "You can't sound heavy unless you have something to compare it to," Kelliher says. "You know, some of these bands are like, `Oh yeah, we're the heaviest band ever,' and all they want to do is punish you the whole time without slowing down. They're missing the point. If you punch someone in the face like crazy, it doesn't achieve the same effect as when you rear back and just go whaaam and then you wind up and hit them again. That'll really fuck somebody up."