I will not introduce Mastodon in this review, you can read about them in the relevant links below this article. I love being lazy.

‘Call of the Mastodon’ is a remixed and remastered cd which contains the band’s first studio recordings and totals at 9 tracks within 30 minutes, and four of these are also on the band’s  EP called ‘Lifesblood’. If you know or have that EP you pretty much know their sound at that time. The band tends to overplay a bit, having a bit more of a chaotic edge to them compared to their later work and Brann Dailor (drums) even pulls out a blast-beat now and then; the songs basically jump around in the musical room. The execution is great and its already obvious that these guys know what they are doing on their instruments. There might be very little melody and the vocals are harsher than what they are on the later records but it is clear that from this "demo" you can hear that Mastodon is one of the most original sounding bands that surfaced in the past few years. 'Leviathan’  might be more well rounded and "musical"  but the foundations are all present on this record.

The quality of this disc is great; maybe not as good as the band’s full lenght albums but the remixing/remastering job by Matt Washburn is excellent. Too bad that we can’t hear how the original demo sounded, but I prefer this album over ‘Lifesblood’ , which sounds a bit stale compared to 'CotM’.

So is this record a must-buy if you’re a Mastodon fan? Yep, definitely. As a fan you probably want to have everything of a certain band anyway and this record has more to offer than ‘Lifesblood’ , it sounds a tad better and hey: it has more tracks. If you never heard Mastodon before I suggest to start with ‘Leviathan’  and work your way backwards through their discography since the band’s first recordings might be hard to get into.