Meshuggah

It goes without saying that this Swedish band of thrash futurists has succeeded in twisting our collective perception of metal into a pretzel -- or, more appropriately, a Möbius strip -- and metal is forever different for it. So maybe it's a little ungrateful to demand that Meshuggah thoroughly mess up our heads with every new album. The good news is that the band's previous album, Nothing, showed that it could simplify its inhumanly complex, badass approach to rhythm and still make it work. The bad news is that Catch Thirty-Three shows for the first time that Meshuggah might be running low on inspiration. Other than a few spacey interludes, the rhythms just seem to plod. When you write riffs that are impossible for most humans to follow, let alone remember, and the drummer plays off-time on top of them with a precision that can screw up your breathing pattern, the question becomes: why? Clearly, Meshuggah wants to avoid repeating itself, and despite this uninspiring effort, there isn't sufficient reason to think the band won't keep dazzling us for a long time. But let's keep our fingers crossed ... just in case.