Meshuggah - Catch Thirty three - [Nuclear Blast]

2005-06-23

At a certain point in time a band sinks too deep in its weight and seemingly collapses.
Thirtythree is a perfect example.

Meshuggah were always boundary breaching, consensus breaking and quite insane, they have created some true classics of the genre, and their brand of Jazz/Thrash/metal core certainly revolutionized metal music as we know it, and set new standards and limits to what was thought to be the known boundary of the genre.

All that acknowledged, this is a crap album.

The 13 songs that are declared on its cover are actually three long passages of boredom that could make an insomniac loss consciousness and do his best winter bear impersonation ever.

Riffs are chewed and then disgorged only to be eaten again for minutes on end, and the boundaries are broken with such lengths that I can't be bothered to follow.

Basically, the band seems to be playing a riff for two minutes, and the editing does the rest for the remaining ten, yes, its that long.

Though the band's usual brilliance shines through some of the more interesting riffs and jazz like passages, its all drowned in the maze of repetition that envelopes this album, and as stated in a rather bad Hellraiser film : "Hell Is Repetition".

It certainly was for me.

Alon Miasnikov