Oh yeah baby, Meshuggah, my Swedish calccore fuckers, before they went all mathematical and blew everybody’s minds to smithereens with their polyrhythmic insanity, they dropped this little beauty in 95, Destroy Erase Improve, and shit if this isnt my personal fucking watershed moment, look im totally biased here, this was my teenage metal bible so take this whole thing with a grain of salt the size of fucking texas.
So we kick off with “Future Breed Machine” and holy fucking christ what a way to start an album, the screaming just comes at you like a freight train, pure blazing mayhem, still got that trademark stop/go sound from early Meshuggah but heavier, more complex, with way more changes than before, this is the single and it shows, reminds me of early Fear Factory but more complex and with everyone screaming their lungs out, something that would fade away in later albums, building to this beautiful guitar solo with a crescendo that goes straight into almost headbanging double bass madness, then another stop/go guitar solo, this shit is the bomb!
“Beneath” is one of the more mellow tracks with some nice solos to give you a breather, then “Soul Burn” hits and fuck me if i dont love this one, again reminds me of early Fear Factory’s “Body Hammer” just with that weirdly Meshuggah ending and another bizarre guitar solo, it just works so damn well. “Transfixion” is maybe one of the more classic progressive metal tracks, less complex, more moody kind of jam, still good but not groundbreaking. “Vanished” starts off more classic death metal then goes into this progressive rock guitar solo crescendo that kinda goes nowhere, the track is great but its kinda disjointed, feels like two different songs mashed together.
“Acrid Placidity” is just a nice calm interlude, nothing more nothing less, then “Inside What’s Within Behind” brings back the stop/go formula and here we start to see the pattern of this album, a groovy jam that goes into a weirdly catchy guitar electronic solo that ends in a doom/gloom metal vibe, its weird and great. “Terminal Illusions” is a strange one, it has a nice groove and stop/go but it never really gets into a nice flow, i would say its the first miss in the album.
But then we get “Suffer in Truth” and what the fuck is this work of art, you want moody guitars with breakneck jam drums, when they yell suffer in truth you gotta bang your head, this is pure gold. And we finish with “Sublevels” and its perfect, its a moody track, its a jazz track that starts to deteriorate into death groove metal and ends in weird progressive rock mumblings, its awesome and the perfect end to the album.
This is the nascent birth of mathcore and the beginning of Meshuggah as a band that drives to not only outperform themselves but out create their own music, every album after this is always an experience, sure like all experiences some are better than others, but always always an experience. This is an amazing catchy album, i would say for a metalhead the perfect introduction to Meshuggah and it has aged perfectly like fine wine, its in Rolling Stone’s top 50 prog rock albums of all time for good reason! I also have to point out the work with sound environments and blistering almost absurd percussion, its what drives this album, even when songs dont click that percussion always clicks!