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Current price: $17.99
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Within the realms of
, few bands are more esoteric and left-brained than
. These Swedes make music for clinically minded deconstructionists, and one really has to reduce
's sound to its individual elements before seeing the overall picture.
, their fourth full-length slab, only further cements their place as masterminds of cosmic calculus
-- call it
if you want -- and, to their credit, they're really the only ones to fall into said sub-subgenre. When odd riff cycles, robotic
vocals, neo-
chromatics, and mathematical songwriting are your primary weapons, it would seem easy to paint yourself into a corner creatively -- so where is
to go after
, the band's powerful statement of intent, and its follow-up, the suffocatingly violent and clattery
? Well, besides being heavier -- guitarists
and
used eight-string guitars to give extra growl to their off-kilter, occasionally dissonant chording -- the appropriately titled
boasts more spacious arrangements, the jarring tempo and time shifts colliding with each other until the songs collapse on themselves like black holes (see
and the seven-plus minutes of
). From there, light bends into
the theme of the record rooted in existentialism and the psychic trauma it causes on the brain -- and so goes the cranium stretching, through
and the creepily invigorating lunar strains of
all being anti-melodic, teeth-grinding jaunts into opaque mathematical regions, importing small amounts of
's
into the group's
-by-way-of-
sonic maelstrom.
truly gives new meaning to the word heavy, redefining boundaries by pushing
into the realms of abstract science; for those lucky enough to be tuned into
's unique wavelength, the album, like all good art, tickles the subconscious while probing both the internal (the mind) and the external (space). And when
explores, it's into uncharted territory. If only more
bands could be so daring. ~ John Serba