I gotta say, the more I listen to all of these Mastodon albums, the more I'm reminded of the days when I first got into metal in 2007. Back when I didn't care as much about vocals and just focused on the music as a whole.
The biggest thing I remember from that time was this one night back in the December of that year and my family went out into Honolulu to do some volunteer work at a small rundown homeless shelter somewhere in the middle of the city's own personal Chinatown. My dad had just been deployed to Iraq a few days before and I was stuck with my mom and my younger sister for the following six months.
We lived on another part of the island, so we had a pretty long drive to get that shelter- first from our house to the church at Pearl Harbor and from Pearl Harbor to the shelter. Back then, I listened to Dio-era Black Sabbath, Megadeth and was getting into old school Metallica. On the long drives there and back, as well as whatever brief moments I had away from the volunteer work, I listened to Ride the Lightning over and over again. I still remember listening to "Fade to Black" that night as the church bus drove on the highway with the city lights flying by.
Obviously I moved away to other bands and albums over time, but those early days were the first steps to where I am today. And now I'm here in college and listening to Leviathan and I'm having that same feeling I had back that night when I listened to RtL. Absolutely surreal stuff...