The music video for Mastodon’s “Seabeast” arrived in January 2006, more than a year after Leviathan had turned Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick into the governing image of the band’s second album. Its old-film look was not simply a stylistic imitation added in post-production. Directors Jonathan Rej and Tom Bingham of Authority Films shot the video in Atlanta’s Madison Theater, a venue that opened in 1927 as a silent movie house, using a hand-cranked 35mm camera and filmmaking techniques associated with the 1920s and 1930s.
That production choice gives “Seabeast” a useful place inside Mastodon’s larger act of adaptation. Leviathan was already a loose translation of a nineteenth-century novel into heavy music. The video translates that translation again, moving Melville’s names and obsessions through a deliberately antiquated cinematic machine. Book, album, and film do not tell the same story. Each keeps a different piece.
Moby-Dick as a working method
Brann Dailor has described the origin of Leviathan in practical terms. While touring in 2003, he was reading Moby-Dick and began proposing its images and characters as a framework for the next Mastodon record. In interviews from the period and the twentieth-anniversary cycle, he has emphasized that the album was never intended as a scene-by-scene adaptation. Ahab’s pursuit of the whale offered the band a metaphor for their own obsessive commitment to making music and touring without any guarantee that the pursuit would produce security or success.
That distinction matters especially on “Seabeast.” The song names Queequeg and Ahab directly, so the connection to Melville is explicit. Yet the lyric does not remain inside the novel’s plot. It moves from Queequeg and the beast toward roots, sand, wounds, a temple, offerings, hope, and a child beside a mother. Mastodon borrow characters and situations, then let them enter the band’s own symbolic vocabulary.
Even Queequeg is compressed rather than faithfully retold. In Moby-Dick, he becomes seriously ill and has a coffin made for himself, then recovers. That coffin later becomes the life buoy that saves Ishmael after the Pequod is destroyed. “Seabeast” takes the language of Queequeg’s survival and places it inside a song that is already moving away from Melville’s chronology. The method is closer to collage than illustration.
An adaptation of an adaptation
The original press material for the “Seabeast” video described its action as a battle involving Ahab, Mr. Queequeg, pride, and creatures of the sea. That wording is revealing. Pride is given the same narrative weight as a character or monster. The directors did not simply visualize a whale hunt. They converted one of Leviathan‘s central abstractions, destructive obsession, into a theatrical conflict populated by sailors, beasts, exaggerated bodies, and ritualized movement.
The Madison Theater was more than a picturesque location. Rej specifically connected the venue to the filmmaking method: the theater had opened during the silent era and later became one of Atlanta’s early venues for talking pictures. Shooting there with a hand-cranked camera made the video’s historical language material rather than decorative. Uneven motion, broad gesture, stark contrast, painted-looking sets, and visible theatricality come from a production built to behave like an old film rather than simply resemble one.
That is why the video’s exaggerated acting works. Silent cinema did not possess one universal gestural vocabulary, and “Seabeast” should not be treated as a faithful reconstruction of a specific 1920s movement or film school. Authority Films instead assembled a generalized early-cinema language. Bodies lurch, point, recoil, kneel, and confront monsters in ways that make the performance legible even before the viewer follows any narrative detail. The result is intentionally artificial, closer to a rediscovered stage spectacle than to naturalistic seafaring drama.
Four minutes against the scale of the whale
“Seabeast” is only 4:15 long, which makes its position inside Leviathan interesting. The novel Mastodon borrowed from is enormous; “Hearts Alive,” later on the album, stretches beyond thirteen minutes. “Seabeast” handles scale through compression instead. Brent Hinds and Troy Sanders share the vocal credits, Hinds and Bill Kelliher play guitar, Troy Sanders plays bass, and Brann Dailor drums. All four members are credited as writers.
The track keeps the early Mastodon tension between weight and motion. Guitar figures lock into Dailor’s restless percussion without settling into one uniform sludge tempo, and the voices enter as another rhythmic layer rather than floating above the arrangement. The song changes direction quickly enough that the Moby-Dick references feel like flashes inside a larger current. Ahab and Queequeg appear, then disappear. The music does the same thing with its own ideas.
This is one reason the old description of the song as simply “stormy” was insufficient. The storm is there, but the structure is organized. Leviathan marked the point where Mastodon were learning to make complexity function as narrative timing. Bill Kelliher has described the band as becoming more connected as songwriters on the album, with more deliberate note choices and structures. “Seabeast” compresses that development into one of the record’s shorter pieces.
What belongs to Brent Hinds
This article was first published on August 22, 2025, two days after Brent Hinds died in a motorcycle crash in Atlanta at the age of 51. By then he was no longer a member of Mastodon, but he had spent twenty-five years helping build the band from its beginning. Mastodon’s statement after his death called him a creative force with whom they had shared the music, milestones, and history that shaped the group.
That context makes “Seabeast” difficult to watch now without turning the video into an archive of Hinds himself. The temptation is understandable, especially because his guitar language and voice are so identifiable. Yet the stronger tribute keeps the collective nature of the song intact. Hinds did not write “Seabeast” alone. He appears inside a four-person Mastodon composition whose identity depends on friction between Hinds, Kelliher, Sanders, and Dailor.
The video preserves that relationship in motion. Four musicians are placed inside a world built from somebody else’s novel, then somebody else’s old cinematic technology, and made to behave as part of the fiction. Hinds is visible within the machinery rather than isolated from it. For a musician whose work with Mastodon was so often defined by the strange fit between blues, country, psychedelic phrasing, extreme metal, and the ideas of three other players, that seems more accurate than extracting one heroic image from the frame.
There is another reason the hand-cranked camera matters now. Old film technology makes movement look remote even while preserving it. Bodies accelerate, hesitate, and flicker because the mechanism recording them does not reproduce time with modern smoothness. “Seabeast” therefore carries two kinds of distance at once: Mastodon reaching back to Melville and early cinema, and present-day viewers looking back at a version of the band that can no longer exist.
The video’s achievement lies in refusing a clean hierarchy among those histories. Melville supplies names and obsession. Mastodon transform them into a metal album about their own pursuit. Authority Films transform the song into a false artifact from an earlier cinema. Brent Hinds remains inside all three layers as guitarist, vocalist, co-writer, and performer. The sea monster is imaginary. The record of the people who made it is not.
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Mastodon: Leviathan on Bandcamp | Seabeast video, Relapse Records