Technically, this isn't a new album. In fact, it's the oldest Mastodon material you can get commercially. Five of the 29 tracks on "Call of the Mastodon" are remastered from the band's first release, 2001's "Lifesblood," and the other four are previously unreleased tracks recorded at the same session the "Lifesblood" tracks were laid down.
All of the tracks have been remastered by the original producer, Matt Washburn, and, interestingly, the clips of dialogue that led into the songs on "Lifesblood" are absent on this release. This is a minor quibble, however, and actually serves to help the flow of the album.
The music is obviously Mastodon, even though it's from early in the band's existence. Fast, pounding, complex drum parts permeate the songs, with the guitars playing off of one another. Brent Hinds tops it all off with his recognizably inhuman screams and growls. The vocals on "Call of the Mastodon" make the vocals off of 2004's "Leviathan" sound clean by comparison.
Mastodon is usually compared to The Dillinger Escape Plan, due to both bands' tendencies to change time signatures on a dime, courtesy of insanely talented drummers who play with astounding speed and complexity. One can readily discern Dillinger's influence on "Call Of The Mastodon"; the opening ten seconds of "We Built This Come Death" would sound right at home on a Dillinger Escape Plan release, as would the churning, barking breakdown halfway through "Hail To Fire" or the guitar section of "Battle At Sea." Another influence can be heard in the first seven seconds of "Hail To Fire," in a guitar part that smacks of Converge. Mastodon even delves into a little bit of doom metal experimentation on the chugging "Slickleg."
None of this is to say that Mastodon is ripping off either of these bands. Where The Dillinger Escape Plan and Converge are almost always classified as "hardcore," Mastodon is obviously a metal band. Instead of merely copying these other bands, Mastodon has taken these elements from other genres and incorporated them into their own sound while still remaining inventive and capable of creating original tracks. They successfully combine metal with hardcore, at the same time deftly avoiding sounding like the much maligned "metalcore" genre, something Mastodon has successfully done in all of their work since these first recordings.
It's always remarkable to listen to early works by a band to see how their sound came together and evolved, and this development is readily apparent when you listen to "Call Of The Mastodon" and compare it to, say, their most recent release, "Leviathan." Listeners new to Mastodon would be better off picking up the aforementioned "Leviathan" in order to better get a feel for how the band sounds now that they've really carved out a niche for themselves.
As the last five years have shown, Mastodon has indeed become a force to be reckoned with in the metal scene, and in the music industry at large. Overall, "Call of the Mastodon" is a great piece of history for fans to have access to. Even more than that, it's a release that can stand on its own as something more than just a glimpse into Mastodon's past.
