I was in Bologna, ready to see a Meshuggah concert with a friend and my older sister.

Before the concert, I entered a record store, the legendary Metal Factory, and even though I didn’t want to buy anything, they suggested The Veil of Control by Dysrhythmia to me: they had intuited that I was a lover of avant-garde sounds, so to speak, crooked, if not extremely crooked, complex, yet at the same time brutal (not surprisingly, within a few hours I would see Meshuggah again!), thus with a surprised demeanor, I accepted the suggestion and bought said album.

I haven’t regretted it: the album is perhaps one of the few indefinable works I've listened to in the last 5 years, a mix of dissonance, strange timings, dark and gloomy atmospheres, sounds that are nothing short of extremely refined for a Tech Death that isn't Tech Death (nor Take That, forgive me the joke), a Metal that isn't Metal, an utterly exaggeratedly advanced Prog that isn't Prog, music that is almost more Ambient than anything else.

Paradoxically anti-cacophonous, in its shrill melodies, the short-duration album remains nonetheless an interesting sonic journey that makes introspection and meta languages its strength; the generally clean guitars reign supreme along with a "light" but ultra-technical drum set (as tradition dictates) as impenetrable and complex sonic patterns develop through bass tapping rounds, dissonance, and more.

Not an easy album, to be clear: sometimes the proposal could seriously bore, as to keep the attention high you have to stay still and indeed, listen, without distractions, the entire CD, something that doesn’t allow me to give it the highest ratings.

The work indeed is absolutely not for everyone, not even for Metalheads I would dare say: here, we go beyond the concept of Prog and Metal, even Tech Death as previously mentioned seems a tight fit as a definition.

A very beautiful album anyway, suitable as a background for a waking nightmare on a rainy day.

Ghostly.

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