A re-release of Leviathan's latest, now in a stark sleeve that houses all eleven of the double-sided art prints / inserts and the disc.

A 2022 vinyl reissue of Leviathan's latest, which also houses an large LP sized stack of the double-sided art prints / inserts that also appeared in the CD edition.

This American black metal innovator is back with has become a much-heralded new album (his fifth), and it's the best stuff that sole member Jef Whitehead (working under the pseudonym Wrest) has produced under the Leviathan name in years. It's also one of the best black metal albums to emerge thus far in 2015, a mature new vision of the sort of misanthropic, idiosyncratic black metal that Whitehead has been creating since the late 1990s, and longtime fans of the band's work will find some interesting new wrinkles in Leviathan's sound on Scar Sighted.

That often discordant, unsettling blackened violence remains at the core of Leviathan's sound, but it's channeled through a more tangled, hallucinatory atmosphere that melds that black metal attack with soaring post-rock and experimental soundscapes, churning doom and bleak industrial , spun out into arresting and elaborately layered constructs. It's certainly a more sophisticated and focused album than Leviathan's provocative True Traitor True Whore, but rest assured that this sounds as savage as ever. An untitled intro casts waves of mournful orchestral drift across an expanse of murmuring voices and minimalist metallic clank, crafting a gorgeously moody atmosphere over the opening of Scar Sighted before Whitehead fully unleashes his blackened violence with "The Smoke Of Their Torment". And it's fearsome when that finally kicks in, his signature mix of sludgy riffage and bleary dissonance dragging through a swarming black fog of complex black metal delivered at maximum aggression. Dissonant guitar figures caper over the surging rhythmic complexity, his drumming shifting continuously between boiling double bass, tricky time signatures and blasts of straightforward thrash. That song is a fantastic piece of imaginative black metal, bleary and chaotic, but only hinting at the strange excursions that this album takes as it continues.

It’s caustic stuff, with varied and expressive vocals that slip from delirious chanting to blood-gargling screams to demented crooning stretched out across the bizarrely arranged riffs and stretches of muted monochromatic atmosphere. The continues to seethe and snarl from beneath an onslaught of powerful, memorable black metal riffs and an almost proggy complexity to the songwriting, moving from the strange fusion of classic, ice-encrusted Nordic fury and folk-flecked madness of "Dawn Vibration", to the dark industrial-tinged march of "Gardens Of Coprolite" that eventually blossoms into a stunning combination of maniacal black blast and churning math rock-style guitars; other songs feature some massively heavy doom-laden parts glazed with soaring, sun-blinded melodies, and there's more of that odd folkiness that pops up on the likes of "Wicked Fields Of Calm", almost like part of an old English madrigal taking shape out of the swarming blackened guitars. One of the album's most vicious songs is "Within Thrall", which starts off with some of that plaintive chanting and dissonant chords, but ends up winding through a labyrinth of searing blastbeats and violent blackened punk riffs. As on previous albums, Whitehead artfully employs industrial-style noise and surreal soundscapes throughout the album, brief but unsettling pieces of abstract sound woven directly into the songs, and there are moments where processed guitar blares across the music like a horn section, like some majestic fanfare sounding from the depths. The title track is another particularly impressive track, an anguished, almost funereal dirge that spirals downward, surrounded with distant, miserable shrieks and an affecting, mournful sadness that produces one of the album's most poignant compositions, eventually finding its way into an almost Godspeed-esque coda. And there are elements of classic 'gazey guitar and martial rhythms, liturgical chants and hypnotic electronic pulses, shades of industrial and neo-folk sounds that all further color Scar Sighted's desolate terrain, integrated into the lurching blackened heaviness and baleful blasts in a commanding and deeply personal manner.

A wickedly impressive album that is exhausting and enthralling in equal measure, and an accomplished and adventurous direction for Leviathan's music.