Brann Dailor's Drum Setup on Mastodon's Leviathan (2004) | MetalForge

Frequently Asked Questions

What drums did Brann Dailor use on Leviathan?

Brann Dailor recorded Mastodon's Leviathan (2004) using a Tama Starclassic Bubinga drum kit — Tama's flagship bubinga line, featuring six-ply African bubinga shells with the Star-Cast mounting system. The configuration was a double-kick setup with two 22 inch by 18 inch bass drums, 10 inch and 12 inch rack toms, and 14 inch and 16 inch floor toms. The dense, focused fundamental of bubinga shells suited the album's heavy concept-record character, providing the architectural canvas for Dailor's cascading melodic fills. Some sources have cited DW Collector's Series for this album, but the historically accurate kit for the 2003-2004 Leviathan sessions is the Tama Starclassic Bubinga — Mastodon's Tama endorsement relationship dates from this era.

Why is Leviathan considered Mastodon's breakthrough?

Leviathan (2004) is considered Mastodon's breakthrough because it elevated the band from underground sludge metal status to international critical acclaim. The album earned a Grammy nomination for 'Blood and Thunder' (Best Metal Performance, 2005), topped Revolver magazine's Album of the Year list, and appeared on numerous year-end critic polls. As a Moby-Dick concept album with serious compositional ambition, Leviathan announced Mastodon as a band capable of writing thematically coherent records that worked both as headbanging metal and as music for listeners who valued the more progressive elements of the genre. It also established the band's relationship with Tama drums and Sabian cymbals (later switched to Meinl), and it set the stage for the subsequent records — Blood Mountain (2006), Crack the Skye (2009), and beyond — that built Mastodon into one of the most critically respected metal bands of the 21st century.

What cymbals did Brann Dailor use on Leviathan?

On Leviathan (2004), Brann Dailor used Sabian HHX series cymbals — Sabian's hand-hammered 'extreme' line, prized for its bright, articulate, cutting character. His setup included 14 inch HHX Groove Hi-Hats, a 17 inch HHX Evolution Crash, an 18 inch HHX X-Plosion Crash, a 21 inch HHX Groove Ride, an 18 inch HHX China (heavily featured throughout the album), and a 10 inch HHX Splash for accent work. This Sabian HHX setup was Brann's cymbal voice through the early-to-mid 2000s era. He later switched to Meinl Byzance cymbals for Crack the Skye (2009) and every subsequent record, trading the HHX's bright cutting attack for the darker, more atmospheric Byzance character.

What is the song "Blood and Thunder" about?

'Blood and Thunder' is the opening track of Mastodon's Leviathan (2004) and the song that earned the album its Grammy nomination for Best Metal Performance at the 2005 Grammy Awards. Like the rest of Leviathan, the song draws directly from Herman Melville's Moby-Dick: the lyrics narrate Captain Ahab's obsessive pursuit of the white whale, with lines like 'White whale, holy grail' referencing the central image of the novel. The song became one of Mastodon's signature tracks and remains a fixture in their live sets. Musically, it features a galloping double-kick pattern under the central riff, a cascading tom fill at the opening that functions as a melodic statement, and the bright, trashy HHX China cymbal accents that mark every riff transition — gear and performance choices that defined the band's mid-2000s sound.

Where was Leviathan recorded?

Leviathan was recorded at Studio Litho in Seattle, Washington — Stone Gossard's studio, the room where Soundgarden and Pearl Jam shaped a generation of Pacific Northwest rock. The album was produced by Matt Bayles, the engineer-producer who had previously worked with Isis on Oceanic (2002), Botch on We Are the Romans (1999), and engineered for Pearl Jam. Note that Leviathan was NOT recorded at Doppler Studios in Atlanta — that was Crack the Skye (2009) five years later, with producer Brendan O'Brien. The Studio Litho sessions and Bayles' post-metal recording sensibility gave Leviathan its dimensional, physically present drum sound that differs significantly from the dryer, denser Mastodon records that came before and the more atmospheric records that came after.