The Violent Sleep Of Reason, the band’s eighth full-length studio album, finds Meshuggah building upon their legacy for fearless metal sculpting within the context of extreme metal, but also recapturing some of the magic and excitement specifically within the aspect of performance, finding flow and groove that would be a challenge for any lesser band to locate, given such technical geometric madness at mischievous hand.
How do you write about a Meshuggah album? Or describe their music in a way that either hasn’t been done before or to someone who has never quite gotten into them? The challenging nature of the music Meshuggah create makes it difficult in some ways to review but that is exactly the point of their music in the first place, to challenge you in a way that makes you really think about what you are hearing and not just some thing that sits in the background. In saying that, the music is not so overly complex that you can’t get into it, it’s headbanging stuff and it grooves a hell of a lot and once it clicks with you, it’s a brilliant piece of creative venture.
Meshuggah’s latest offering “The Violent Sleep Of Reason” continues on the path that the band forged many years ago, guitar and bass driven music with off kilter rhythms and unconventional song structures. The signature sound is well intact here and once the opening track “Clockworks” kicks in, that all familiar Meshuggah sound swarms all over your ears. The longest track on the album is punishing from start to finish as it throws you about for just over 7 minutes straight. Most of the songs here are groove oriented, “Born In Dissonance” which is the first track released to the public is a fairly good representation of the album with it’s strong creepy vibe and a guitar sounding siren that rings out the song to the end making it horrific in it’s dark mood. Those dark, creepy moments are mapped out all over the album, from the title track that skips and jumps everywhere to the final closer “Into The Decay” which brings the creepy theme to an end, this album is one of the moodiest albums by the band to date. There’s an almost industrial, gritty feel to the whole thing that would fit with a horror soundtrack or even something out of Aliens, which the album cover depicts pretty well too.
The string bending, bass driven songs are all here too like in “Monstrocity” which is an absolute beast of a song and a definite highlight. The funk grooves of “By The Ton” and “Ivory Tower” are a real pleasure to listen to and seem made for the live show. The album is everything you love about Meshuggah and more, there’s nothing spectacularly new here but it’s consistently good and shows that the band are not showing any signs of slowing down or going in drastically different directions. Most metal fans and Meshuggah fans will love that so there is absolutely no reason to not like “The Violent Sleep Of Reason” at all unless you really hate Meshuggah but with music this good, why would you?
TRACKLIST
Clockworks
Born In Dissonance
MonstroCity
By The Ton
Violent Sleep Of Reason
Ivory Tower
Stifled
Nostrum
Our Rage Won’t Die
Into Decay
