Meshuggah
Destroy Erase Improve

THE REVIEW

A twelve-year-old goes to the record store and asks for the freshly re-released "Masters Of Reality" by Sabbath at a nice price; the shrewd shopkeeper, not having it in stock, and calculating that a twelve-year-old is generally musically naive, offers (or forces upon, as you like) him the best-selling metal album of the time.

The twelve-year-old returns home and, after putting the small portable stereo to an unbearable test for almost an hour, unable to distinguish even a sound, curses the shopkeeper, abandons the CD, and vows to change stores.

Three years pass, and the fifteen-year-old throws a house party; after a while, he leaves the stereo (this one truly worthy of its name and not portable) and tells his metalhead friend to take care of it. After a while, a record starts playing, and the fifteen-year-old thinks the metalhead friend brought his treasures from home and enjoys a great CD. The party ends, and our hero asks his friend for the name of the band and the CD he played at the beginning, only to receive a "BOOH, if you don't know it's yours, imagine how much I know." So the fifteen-year-old realizes that at twelve he didn't understand a damn thing about music, listens to the CD for months and frequently returns to the shrewd shopkeeper.

Now the fifteen-year-old is nineteen and continues to listen to that CD, which has features rarely found in other works.
Extremely intricate rhythms subject to continuous changes of speed, (while always keeping it very high) the "soloist" (Fredrik Thorendal, the band's mastermind) delights us with very sharp but never misplaced distortions, and managing to insert jazz-fusion solos in various pieces ("Sublevels", the most contaminated), which sounds like a mussel in ricotta tortellini, but is the cherry on top, bassist (Peter Nordin) who can also "steer the ship" ("Beneath"), drummer-secondary voice (Jens Kidman) with an "easy" double pedal, and logically a singer with an animalistic growl.

This album has a bit of everything, from 80s B.Area Thrash ("Future Breed Machine"), more monolithic and articulated tracks ("Soul Burn", with an incredibly intricate ending), pieces like "Inside What's Within Behind", which recalls F. Factory, but after 15 years of technical schooling, melodic arpeggios (Marten Hagstrom in "Acrid Placidity").

I've seen it multiple times among the 10 best metal albums of all time on various sites and magazines, surely the band's masterpiece.

On Halloween day, I can't think of a more fitting album.