I like bands I don't get. I like authors whose work I have to struggle to understand. I feel it makes me smarter in the long run to have to run, intellectually, to keep up.
Meshuggah, I feel 100%, make music specifically designed to make you have to fucking sprint to keep up.
God bless you, Swedes: bless you for not pandering to the lowest common denominator. Bless you for going straight up your own asses for the sake of the exploration of art.
Yanno, I go out of my way to find "weird," i.e., statistically anomalous music, art and literature-- I've studied Asian and African music and their use of micro-tones (i.e., notes outside the typical Western 12, i.e., the notes between The Notes), and though these can sound quite odd to my Western-trained ears, Meshuggah is much weirder.
And, even for Meshuggah, I is weird: constantly changing, many rhythms at one time (I want to be the first reviewer of Meshuggah to not use the word "polyrhythms" in the write-up), asymmetrical time signatures (e.g., 3/4 or 6/8), and so on.
It's an EP, it's 21 minutes, it's one song. It's weird as shit, but it's fascinating.
--Horn
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