Car Bomb
Meta

Simultaneously with the farewell of sacred monsters The Dillinger Escape Plan, mathcore regains another of its absolute heavyweights. Car Bomb returns from New York, and with their third album, Meta, 2016 is further enriched with uncompromising and direct music. Did we need it? Hell YES.

I realize it from the very first listens, Meta is a powerful work, meticulously crafted and enhanced by an excellent, clear, surgical production. Every nuance, every riff, divergent and twisted, hits us like the slash of a katana between head and neck, and it’s a beautiful sensation.

Music that slices your eardrums like not even the fearsome Miracle Blade knives of chef Tony. Remember him? When he sliced the pineapple in midair?!? Slice slice slice… …okay, I could have spared you this.

The first thing you notice right from the start in Meta are the guitar riffs. I could talk about them for hours and not be satisfied.

Square riffs, cubic, extremely elaborate to the point they seem born from a highly advanced computer capable of generating them in succession; for some strange reason, though, the software that generates them is corrupted, altered, and the riffs sometimes truncate, multiply and divide, spreading in our auditory system with tentacular ferocity. What guides them? More than a drum’s percussion, I feel them as the strokes of a robotic cox, dictating cadence, impeccably, on board a hi-tech galleon, plowing the seas of our intense thirst for metal in the third millennium. UH!!!

Okay, I’m calming down… let's try to reason. You’re familiar with Meshuggah, right? Make them bastard by forcing them on a diet that consists of hardcore, after every meal. The most ignorant and uncompromising hardcore, though, that of the Big Apple. And there you have the rhythms, composed yet variable, tense yet focused; they don’t always go at 200 mph, they don’t need to. Because in the calmer moments, it’s the hardness of bass and guitar that takes center stage, giving us music so dense, heavy and solid that if it were possible to transmute it into an object, it would find no other form than that of a gigantic wrecking ball.

And I haven’t talked about the voice… not the most original timbre, surely, but the excellent outlet in such a chaotic ensemble of bomb-like violence. When it’s not aggressive and screamed, it is… it is… it's different. Atonal, sighed. Even melodic sometimes. A Paige Hamilton 2.0, artificially reconstructed in a secret laboratory of a dystopian future.

And it's in these little snippets of "harmony" where our band, who for almost all of these 50 minutes behave like insensitive androids in ruthless pursuit of any Mr. Anderson, reveal themselves human. Angry humans, sure, but capable of giving us a tremendously fun, enjoyable, and joyful album. At times even too cold and cynical, but in its way engaging.

From the steel-bending of the opener “From The Dust Of This Planet”, to the infinite tumbling of “Black Blood”, up to “Sets”, bolstered by the cavernous vocals of a special guest: his brutality Frank Mullen, which will give more than a shiver to all those eternal children like myself, raised on bread and Suffocation. It’s like being at an already fantastic party, and suddenly, despite the intoxication, spotting that great friend of yours you haven’t seen in so long. I believe I’ve made the point clear, we’ve all been there.

Meta is an album whose stylistic patterns appear defined, although chaotic and continuously changing, but which surprises for its results and realization. Djent, mathcore, technical-post-hardcore metal? Call it what you want, but if you need today, now, immediately, pure sonic concreteness, without compromise, without falling into the already heard (and here I challenge you…), this and only this is what is for you.

I still don’t know what the title of the work refers to. But if the Meta in Car Bomb's breakneck race was to excite me (besides making me headbang and go deaf, details…), they succeeded completely.

Does it make sense to get excited over such a musical massacre? Hell YES.