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So I’d thought,
anyhow, until the day before yesterday, when Nuclear Blast sent me a promo
for Meshuggah’s Rare Trax. an excellent record of its own accord,
Rare Trax collects, you guessed it, some rare Meshuggah material.
All terms being relative, of course: in case you’re not familiar with
Meshuggah, they’re a swedish metal band who started out playing a kind
of heavy-downer blues-rock with a serious thrash
addiction and then evolved into a who-stole-my-andro brawn-metal band like
Pissing Razors or Candiria but with more melody than the former and considerably
less straight-up jazz fusion than the latter.
Everything about Rare Trax stands out: one can’t hear a single
one of these songs without feeling intuitively that in this subcategory
of a fringe style’s highly limited subgenre, Meshuggah are in a class
by themselves, possessed of a confidence and sense of purpose that few bands
have. There aren’t many bands who play with such dogged focus that
I’d believe them if they told me that they’re only doing it out
of love for their craft, but Meshuggah is a seriously pissed-off exception.
In a world made sad and wan by a preponderance of false
metal, they throw down a barbed-wire gauntlet and rage like rabid tigers.
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