Mastodon: Leviathan (white & green splatter vinyl) [RELAPSE]

Why you'll love it

This Relapse 20th anniversary edition comes on white & green splatter vinyl in a tip-on gatefold jacket with gold foil stamping and a lyric insert. Revolver, Kerrang! and Terrorizer all named Leviathan their album of 2004.

This edition

• White & green splatter vinyl
• 20th anniversary edition
• Tip-on gatefold jacket
• Gold foil stamping
• Lyric insert

About the album

Plenty of bands have read Moby-Dick. Fewer have tried to turn it into a metal album, and almost nobody has done it as well as four men from Atlanta did on their second record. Leviathan follows Melville's whale hunt from the first riff, and guitarist Bill Kelliher has called it the water album in the band's run of four elemental records.

Matt Bayles co-produced it in Seattle in March 2004. "Blood and Thunder," with Clutch's Neil Fallon on guest vocals, is one of the great openers in modern metal, "Iron Tusk" and "Naked Burn" charge ahead, "Megalodon" and "Seabeast" twist through the changes, and Neurosis's Scott Kelly joins for the sprawling "Aqua Dementia." "Hearts Alive" closes the story over almost fourteen minutes.

Paul Romano's artwork borrows from Hokusai's Great Wave off Kanagawa and a 16th-century view of the Pharos of Alexandria, and MetalSucks twice named the record the best metal album of the 21st century. Melville took about 600 pages to tell the tale; Mastodon did it in under 50 minutes, which we consider very considerate of them.

Also at Kops: more Mastodon on vinyl · browse Metal

Tracklist

Listen

On Relapse (cat# RR6622-1), a reissue of the 2004 album.