The Fifth Desk · Evaluation
Act I · The Map
Mastodon · produced, engineered and mixed by Matt Bayles · Relapse Records · about forty-seven minutes
Mode
Sludge weight, thrash speed and progressive metre joined, organised by a literary conceit
Mythos
The hunt for the white whale, the hunter named, the creature and its element, a voyage, and a man made into a monster for viewing
Phase
Ten tracks; eight compact songs in under thirty minutes, one long piece of about thirteen minutes, and a short quieter coda
Presentation
Album; the Relapse Records release of 31 August 2004, on CD and LP, ten tracks, about forty-seven minutes
Register
Two electric guitars in harmonised and contrary lines, bass, drums leading as a voice, shouted and roared vocals, two guest voices
Scale
The sea and its creatures, a mind gripped by pursuit and madness, the sacred glimpsed, and one deformed human body
Governing Proposition
A heavy band takes the great American novel of the nineteenth century as its frame and renders the hunt for the white whale as an element rather than a story: eight compact songs of riffs that turn without warning, one long voyage to release, and a coda that closes the hunt for a monster on a man who was exhibited as one.
Act II · The Essay
Movement I
The record opens on a riff that climbs and repeats, and within four minutes it has stated everything it will work with: the whale, the hunt and the language of riffs in which the hunt will be told. Neil Fallon of Clutch roars the refrain as a guest, and the refrain names the quarry. “White whale, holy grail”: the object of the hunt is a sacred thing, and the record says so once, plainly, in the only fully sung statement of its myth. Everything after this is pursuit in sound.
Relapse Records released the album on 31 August 2004, on CD and LP: ten tracks, about forty-seven minutes, produced, engineered and mixed by Matt Bayles. It was the band’s second full-length album. The band was Troy Sanders on bass and vocals, Brent Hinds on guitar and vocals, Bill Kelliher on guitar and Brann Dailor on drums, with two guest voices, Fallon on the opening track and Scott Kelly of Neurosis on Aqua Dementia. The album as first released, in that order, is the work; later reissues and live recordings are context.
The frame is Moby-Dick, stated by the band and by the titles. That is a large thing for a heavy band to take on, and the record does not try to retell the novel. It takes from it a condition, obsession as a sea that swallows the obsessed, and it renders that condition as weight. The riff around the refrain pays out like a harpoon line, and the listener is put under the pressure the hunter is under. That is a disclosure made by sound, and it is credited as such.
Movement II
The second and third tracks set hunter and hunted side by side. I Am Ahab is a barking sprint of under three minutes; Seabeast is the record’s first slow, harmonised grief, with a sung rather than screamed line over guitars that reach a cold and vast melancholy. The contrast is structural. The hunter is speed and command; the hunted is mass and sorrow. Neither song needs the other explained, and the pair establishes in seven minutes the two poles the rest of the record moves between.
Then comes the stretch where the record is least compelled. Island, Iron Tusk and Naked Burn are each strong in themselves, and each is built from the same matter: a fast picked figure, a tom-led pattern, a shout, a turn into a heavier half time. Any one of them could go without the record losing a stage of its argument, and two of them could change places with little loss. They are permitted rather than required. But they are short, and they keep the density: the first eight tracks together run under thirty minutes.
The form is what holds these songs together, and it is a form that knows something. The riffs turn constantly and without warning, and the drums play across the beat like weather across a hull. In steady four-square metre the record would lose the sense of an element that cannot be predicted. The short songs are sightings: each a glimpse of the thing pursued, none of them the encounter. The encounter never comes. The whale is never met or struck in the music’s narrative, and the songs between the opening and the close trade the figure of Ahab for creatures and weather.
Movement III
In the middle of Megalodon the weight stops, and a twanging, country-picked guitar figure takes its place. It is the furthest the record goes from itself, and it is not a joke. It is played in the same tuning and the same logic of metre as the riffs around it, and it resolves back into the weight it interrupted. The plunge back is the height of the song. One law governs the whole record, riffs that turn without warning, drums leading as a voice, weight as the medium, and this passage is where the law is tested and holds.
The making carries it. Dailor’s drumming carries melody and argument at once, his fills placed as phrases; Hinds and Kelliher interlock in harmonised lines and contrary figures that a less exact band would blur; Sanders’s bass doubles and departs with purpose. Bayles’s production gives the weight definition without polishing it away. The faults are plain too. The vocals are shouted and barked with little command of line, so that the words do not carry, and the mix is dense in the low middle and sometimes buries the guitars’ detail under the drums.
Aqua Dementia follows with Scott Kelly’s voice, and it sounds the depth as madness. The sublime here is of one kind, terror and mass, and it is varied in speed more than in kind. The range the record’s law governs is real and not wide: tempo and density move a great deal, timbre and register much less, and the voice is a roar almost throughout. Some of the coherence is the coherence of a narrow range, and the record does not pretend otherwise.
Movement IV
Hearts Alive runs about thirteen minutes, close to three tenths of the record, and it is the voyage the short songs have been circling. It begins from a quiet figure and builds slowly to a climax whose release is the largest on the album. Without it the record would be eight sightings and a coda; with it, the pursuit has a passage, and the passage ends in release. The arrangement is sustained over its whole length without loss of pressure, and it is the record’s best making.
The turn was real and the stake moderate. The inheritance was Neurosis, the Melvins, the progressive and technical metal of the 1990s and the long concept record of rock, and the band’s own first album, Remission (2002), had already joined sludge weight, thrash speed and progressive metre. What changed here was focus: the same fusion organised by a literary conceit, cleaner in production, more melodic in Seabeast and in this track. A thirteen-minute closer on a second album, for a label that sold to a small audience, was a wager, and it was made from a rising band rather than from nothing.
The record’s force within its field is high. It made a synthesis cohere that had been attempted piecemeal, and it showed that a heavy band could take a literary object and a long form without abandoning brutality. The band moved from the underground to a major label for its next album. Twenty-two years on, drummers transcribe Dailor’s patterns, guitarists learn the interlocking parts, and listeners return to the record as the band’s most concentrated statement. What the return yields is chiefly formal; the words do not open further, and the frame, once grasped, is grasped.
Movement V
The record ends with a short, quieter coda named for Joseph Merrick, the man called the Elephant Man. After a hunt for a monster at sea, it closes on a human being who was exhibited as one. That pairing is the record’s own, and it is where its myth is built rather than borrowed: the monster sought is answered by the monster made, and the sea gives way to a body on land, deformed and put on view. The coda keeps the band’s harmonic language in a quieter register, and it is the record’s necessary exhalation.
What the record holds is the sea and its creatures, held most fully; a mind gripped by pursuit and madness; the sacred, glimpsed in a refrain; and one body. They are held under one condition, the hunt, more than set against each other. Labour, which in the novel is the whaling trade itself, is absent, and so are the family, the state and history. A forty-seven-minute record cannot hold what the novel holds, and against Moby-Dick (9.4) the distance is the distance between a world held and an element rendered.
The recording survives whole after twenty-two years, in print, reissued and in steady circulation, and Blood and Thunder remains a fixture of the band’s sets and of metal broadcast. The production, dense and compressed, ties part of the surface to 2004, though less than many metal records of its years. Among its neighbours the record stands two tenths below Master of Puppets (8.4), the elder record that made the long composed metal album, and level with Jaws (8.2), the desk’s other sea hunt with an Ahab in it, which builds its hunt as narrative and figure where this record renders it as weather.
Act III · The Twelve
Most of the record resists removal. Blood and Thunder must open: it states the whale, the hunt and the riff language in under four minutes. I Am Ahab and Seabeast set hunter and hunted beside each other, the first a barking sprint, the second the record’s first slow, harmonised grief, and the contrast is structural. Hearts Alive is the compelled long form, the voyage the short songs have been circling, and Joseph Merrick its necessary exhalation. Eight songs in under thirty minutes is lean, and the necessity holds at both ends. The test gives in the middle: Island, Iron Tusk and Naked Burn are built from the same matter, and any one could go without the record losing a stage of its argument.
Score: 8.2 / 10
What the record brings into the open can be stated: obsession as a sea that swallows the obsessed, the will to strike at what cannot be struck. It is Melville’s disclosure, and the record carries it by sound, which is credited fully. “White whale, holy grail” names the object of the hunt as a sacred thing, and the riff around it, climbing and repeating like a harpoon line paying out, renders the compulsion as the listener’s own pressure. That is a real disclosure: obsession made felt as weight. What holds the axis is that the words are few, oblique and mostly unheard as sung, and that what the sound discloses is chiefly a state, dread and pursuit, more than a new articulation of the meaning.
Score: 7.8 / 10
The record rises often, and its elevation is the dreadful kind. The opening riff of Blood and Thunder, with Neil Fallon’s roar on the refrain, is a summit of the genre’s grandeur. Seabeast reaches a cold, vast melancholy in its harmonised guitars and a sung rather than screamed line. Megalodon turns in its middle to a twanging, country-picked guitar figure and then plunges back into weight, and the plunge is the height. Aqua Dementia, with Scott Kelly’s voice, sounds the depth as madness, and Hearts Alive builds over thirteen minutes to the record’s largest release. Height comes on five or six of ten tracks. What holds the figure is that the sublime is mostly one register, terror and mass, varied in speed more than in kind.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The white whale is among the strongest archetypes in modern literature, and the record does more than summon it. The sequence bears a frame: the hunter named in I Am Ahab, the creature and its element in Seabeast, Megalodon and Aqua Dementia, an island and a long voyage in Island and Hearts Alive. Then the coda turns the frame on itself. Joseph Merrick closes a hunt for a monster with a human being who was called one, and that pairing is the record’s own, built rather than borrowed: the monster sought at sea is answered by the monster made on land for viewing. What holds the axis is that the frame lives largely in titles, the whale is never met or struck in the music’s narrative, and one refrain sings the archetype as such.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The tradition the record inherits is plain: Neurosis and the Melvins, the progressive and technical metal of the 1990s, the long concept record of rock. Against it the synthesis is a real swerve. A heavy band takes the nineteenth century’s great American novel as its frame; a drummer leads the arrangement as a melodic voice; a country-picked figure is set inside a sludge song; a thirteen-minute closer ends a second album for a label that sold to a small audience. The turn from the band’s first album, Remission (2002), is one of focus more than of kind: the same fusion, organised by a conceit, cleaner in production and more melodic. The stake was moderate, and that holds the figure.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The sequence is counted here, once. Change the form and much of what the record knows goes. The irregular, constantly turning riffs are the sea’s motion; the drums play across the beat like weather across a hull; the short songs are sightings, the long one the voyage, the coda the aftermath on land. Played in steady four-square metre the record would lose the sense of an element that cannot be predicted, and without Hearts Alive it would lose its single sustained form, the passage from pursuit to release. That is form as instrument, purposeful at both ends. What holds it below the top is the middle: the eight short songs share one shape, and Island and Naked Burn could change places with little loss.
Score: 8.3 / 10
Twenty-two years of return are evidence, and the evidence is strong. Drummers transcribe Brann Dailor’s patterns, guitarists learn the interlocking parts, and listeners return to the record as the band’s most concentrated statement. The metres reward repeated hearing, and the interplay of the two guitars with the drums keeps surfacing detail that a first hearing passes over. Weighted for the place the record holds in the study of modern metal drumming and arrangement, that yield shows no sign of being used up. The semantic depth is thinner, and it is the limit. The words do not open further on return, being few and largely unheard, and the Melville frame, once grasped, is grasped.
Score: 8.2 / 10
The field is heavy music in the 2000s, and the intrinsic force is high. The record made a synthesis cohere that had been attempted piecemeal: the weight of sludge, the precision of technical metal, the scope of the progressive concept album and a melodic instinct, in forty-seven minutes with no slack in the playing. It showed that a heavy band could take a literary object and a long form without abandoning brutality. Achieved reach is scored with intrinsic force: the record lifted the band from the underground to a major label for its next album, Blood and Thunder remains a fixture of metal broadcast, and drummers and guitarists still learn its parts. No later practice can be shown to turn on this record alone, and beyond metal the reach is small.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Survival is weighed over twenty-two years: form, then presence, then fabric. The form is whole: the recording survives as released, in print and in steady circulation, and it has been reissued. Presence is wide within its field, and Blood and Thunder remains a fixture of the band’s sets and of metal broadcast; presence earns at most a tenth, and the figure is not lifted for fame. The fabric is the charge. Bayles’s production, dense, compressed and of its decade, fixes part of the surface to 2004, though less than many metal records of those years. The recording has aged better than most of its peers, and the figure sits at the point twenty-two years give, neither lifted nor lowered.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Read to the elder anchors, the playing is of a high order and load-bearing. Dailor’s drumming carries melody and argument at once, his fills placed as phrases rather than ornament. Brent Hinds and Bill Kelliher interlock in harmonised lines and contrary figures that a less exact band would blur, and Troy Sanders’s bass doubles and departs with purpose. The arrangement of Hearts Alive, sustained over thirteen minutes without loss of pressure, is the record’s best making, and Bayles gives the weight definition without polishing it away. Against that: the vocals are the weakest craft, shouted and barked with little command of line, and the mix, dense in the low middle, sometimes buries the guitars’ detail under the drums.
Score: 8.4 / 10
One law governs the record: riffs in irregular metre that turn without warning, drums leading as a voice, and weight as the element everything moves through. Take the most distant elements. The barked sprint of I Am Ahab and the slow climb and release of Hearts Alive obey it; so do the sludge of Aqua Dementia and the country-picked figure inside Megalodon, which is no joke dropped in but is played in the same tuning and metre logic and resolves back into the weight it interrupted. Joseph Merrick’s quieter register keeps the band’s harmonic language. What holds the figure is range: tempo and density vary widely, timbre and register less, and the vocal law, a roar, rarely changes.
Score: 8.4 / 10
Judged on what the record holds, with no further discount for being an album. Four orders are present. Consciousness is held as obsession and madness, in I Am Ahab and Aqua Dementia. The natural order, as sea, beast and element, is held most fully. The sacred is glimpsed in “holy grail” and in the whale as an object of worship and hatred. The body, deformed and exhibited, enters in Joseph Merrick. All four are held under one condition, the hunt. But labour, which in the novel is the whaling trade itself, is absent, and so are the family, the state and history. Few orders, held under one condition rather than set against each other: that is what holds the figure lowest.
Score: 7.1 / 10
Act IV · The Reckoning
8.2 / 10 · Final Average
Placement: Tier IV · Canonical
Strongest Dimensions
The Imperishable, Pressure on Tradition, The Made and The Inner Law at 8.4, then The Living Form at 8.3. A recording that survives whole and in circulation, a synthesis of weight, precision and scope made to cohere, a band whose drumming and interlocking guitars carry the argument, one law holding from a barked sprint to a country-picked figure, and a form in which the riffs are the sea’s motion.
Limiting Dimension
The Encompassed at 7.1: the sea and its creatures, a mind in pursuit, the sacred glimpsed and one body, held under one condition, with labour, the family, the state and history absent. Below the rest, The Unconcealment at 7.8: a disclosure made felt as weight more than articulated, carried by few words that are mostly unheard as sung.
The Necessity Cap clears at 8.2 against a threshold of 7.5. The Coherence Floor clears: The Living Form at 8.3, The Made at 8.4, The Inner Law at 8.4, each against 7.0. The Epochal Gate is unmet on all five: The Imperishable and Pressure on Tradition at 8.4, The Archetypal Deep and The Swerve at 8.2, and The Unconcealment at 7.8 each fall short of the bar of 8.5. The Universal Minimum is met: no axis but The Encompassed falls below 7.8, against 7.5, and The Encompassed, which is exempted, clears its own floor of 6.0 at 7.1. Four of the five summit conditions are met. The summit is withheld by the Epochal Gate, and by the aggregate, which stands at 8.2, in the band of Tier IV and well short of the 9.0 that the summit requires.
Basis · the Relapse Records release of 31 August 2004, on CD and LP, ten tracks in sequence, about forty-seven minutes; judged from knowledge of the recording and its reception. No recording or lyric sheet was in hand. The album as first released is the unit; later reissues, live recordings and any added material are context only. Songs are cited by title, and one fragment of lyric, of four words, is quoted. Track lengths are given only roughly, and no metre is counted. Facts that could not be verified, among them the studio, the painter of the cover, the band’s own account of its early albums as a cycle of elements, which members sing backing parts, any keyboards, the record’s honours on release, the name of the label of the next album, its place in later accounts of the field, performances of the album in full, the tunings and exact metres, and the full lyric of any song, are not given.