Review by Rexorcist for Meshuggah - Catch Thirtythree (2005)

Well, here we go.  Yet another exercise in influence vs. quality.  The mighty Meshuggah apparently reinvented metal with this album by creating the subgenre "djent," which is an onomatopoeia for the guitar sound they were going for.  They had been working on djent for a few albums, but this fifth album of theirs is the one that gets the ladies for being JUST THAT djenty.  The genre is built on repeated angular riffs of a nature right in between avant-garde and prog.  Now I wrote a glowing review for a djent album that appears on the same Metal Academy list challenge as this: Sol Niger Within, by the guitarist of Meshuggah, Fredrik Thordendal.  That was a high creative peak for metal.  This?  Does is hold a candle?  I've heard it a couple of times before, and it didn't.  Will it hold now?

First lemme just say that I see ABSOLUTELY NO REASON to write multiple of the same 100-second song and stick them together in a way that acts like pieces of a puzzle such as other prog epics, because the idea of using the same riff for three songs at a time is definitely NOT prog.  I compare this to the more diverse Destroy Erase Improve already and there was still more diversity and creativity, while maintaining the djent focus.  I mean, don't get me wrong.  A lot of the decisions they make are very cool here.  For being such wacky alien rhythms, they do a bang up job at being just that with the right amount of personality to remain accessible.  After five albums of this, I guess that's to be expected.  But still, these guys are a djent band, which means they are a PROG band.  I mean, if you're gonna have three 100-second songs and a 13-minute song that sound the same, then you're obviously just fucking around.

Well, this one was pretty cool and all and easy to return to for its powerful persona.  But as fare as constructing an album goes, this was a bit of a bust for me.  Since it's got its strengths, I'll give it the bare minimum rating for a good album and that's it.