I Hope You Didn’t Like Your Skull Too Much…
…because Meshuggah is going to f**king crush it, then the rest of this week’s line-up is just going to stomp the remains and/or dance in the ash and dust. Yeah, we have some heavy and just good tunes this week.
Reviews:
Meshuggah – The Violent Sleep of Reason (Nuclear Blast)
Gatecreeper – Sonaran Depravation (Relapse)
Take Over and Destroy – Take Over and Destroy (Prosthetic)
First Impression:
Ion Dissonance – “Perpetually Doomed: The Sisyphean Task” taken from Cast the First Stone out November 18th from Good Fight Music
Meshuggah – The Violent Sleep Of Reason
Gatecreeper – Sonoran Depravation
Take Over And Destroy – Take Over And Destroy
The Sideshow Podcast 
Yeah, Metal Archives missed the mark on that one for sure.
To call them Djent is an unfair misnomer. You can retroactively apply a new label to a band that has been doing it for 30 years. That’d be like calling Sabbath a nu-metal band because the bands of the early 2000’s sited them as an influence. It just makes no sense.
While I agree with you that “groove” doesn’t fit either, it is the closest thing that I think works for what they have listed. There isn’t a groove in any traditional sense of the word, but to call them technical prog, prog, or djent doesn’t do it. They are DEFINITELY a technical band, but to call them “tech prog” feels wrong. I think where they are mostly technical in a rhythm sense, the closest standard word for that is groove. As I said, it doesn’t really work, but I get why that is included.
-n
It’s interesting that you bring up Black Sabbath because it’s my understanding that they were retroactively labeled as “heavy metal”. When they released their first album in 1969 the term heavy metal wasn’t in use, as Black Sabbath were the ones who solidified the sound and genre. They didn’t coin the term heavy metal themselves, so it was others who applied the label to them. So it is possible that a band can be labeled as a new genre even years after they arrive on to the scene. Maybe that’s what we need for Meshuggah. So I hereby declare Meshuggah to be “Polyrhythmic Metal”.
I’m fine with this!
I am late to the party here, but in my iTunes, i call the ‘Post-Thrash/Progressive Metal.” Sure, that may not be 100% accurate either, but it is the best that I got. New Gojira has the same ‘genre’ in iTunes as well, but old Gojira and old Byzantine go under just “Post-Thrash”.
– Brian
So here’s my slightly off-topic question/comment about Meshuggah: what genre are they? My best independent guess was just prog. So to answer the question, I went to Metal Archives. They list Meshuggah as Technical Groove/Thrash and Djent. I say they can’t really be djent because they were around long before djent. Even if Meshuggah inspired Periphery and TesseracT, they are quite different aside from a guitar tone. I don’t know about you, but I don’t get a lot of “groove” from Meshuggah. As Brian said, you try to bang your head to them but you really can’t. That’s not really “groove-y”. Here’s another thing I found odd about the Meshuggah page at Metal Archives: the band listed as most similar to them is Gojira. I’m not seeing that either. Granted, both Meshuggah and Gojira are in a class of their own so it is tough to define them, but the fact that they are both hard to define seems to me to be the only similar quality between Gojira and Meshuggah.