The Tech/Extreme Prog metal appreciation

 

3 stars!?

 

Some great titles in there! Let's see...

 

Meshuggah is definitely a band to look into. Really, anything except for their debut is worth checking out. Destroy Erase Improve and Chaosphere are more thrashy, and everything after that is more thick and groove-laden. I do prefer the latter group of album. I might suggest you listen to the "I" EP. It's just one 21-minute song that kinda shows you all of the band's facets, and it is an awesome track. Most Meshuggah fans (I think) will agree that is song is their best. I'm not sure where you should go from there, but chances are that if you really liked "I," you'll like Nothing and Catch 33. I would recommend the re-release of Nothing. The band didn't have the proper equipment for the original recording, so the guitars are really muddy sounding, among some other things the band wasn't happy with. The re-release features re-recorded guitars and some production tweaks. It sounds thicker and crisper. obZen brings back some of the high-tempo aggression of their old stuff and mixes it with their thick, groovy new sound. All of these albums are great.

 

Moving on...

 

I personally love The Dillinger Escape Plan. They are a frantic band rooted in metal and hardcore, but they mix really insane syncopation, jazzy drumming & chord changes, electronics and so much more! They are very versatile, but they can be very noisy. That aspect of them, especially for the uninitiated to extreme music, is a turn off to many people here (hence their generally low album scores), but I think if you can handle the aggression and noise, you will find that this is one of the greatest and most innovative bands of it's kind. I would recommend you listen to Ire Works. It's their most recent, and it's also the most varietal song-to-song. From there I would work backwards. Miss Machine is also a gem, as is the Irony Is a Dead Scene EP, which features Mike Patton on vocals. The band had a different singer when they formed, and he is on their first EP and full-length. Personally, I find their older stuff too noisy too often. After he left, the band really started to expand their sound. Mike Patton obviously brought a whole new dimenstion to their sound vocally, and their current vocalist is really good as well.

 

I'm going to try to keep the rest of the brief...

 

Protest  the Hero is another great new techy band. They are technical, but very melodic and emotional. Both of their albums are concept albums. It's good stuff.

 

It might be worth your while to check out Behold...the Arctopus. 3-piece avant-metal stuff, featuring Charlie Zeleny on drums (you may know him from his work on Blue Lambency Downward), though he just left the band a short while ago. I think their Nano-Nucleonic Cyborg Summoning EP does a good job of playing extremely complex music while still making the songs memorable and not lifeless mechanics. Their first full-length is a bit disappointing in that it seems way more mechanical and all over the place.

 

Burst is another great band in the genre. Check out Origo and Lazarus Bird. Aggressive metal/hardcore bounces back and forth with spacey, melodic sections. Powerful stuff.

 

These bands/albums are filed as "Experimental/Post-Metal," but they kinda straddle the line between that and this:

 

Baroness - Red Album. Imagine Mastodon mixed with southern and indie rock, I guess.

 

Intronaut - Prehistoricisms. Originating in a sludgy death metal sound, this band also incorporates jazzy interludes and deep grooves. The music is led by an awesome rhythm section, which includes an amazing fretlass bass player, who himself is rooted in Indian and other ethnic kinds of music. This ethnic stuff surfaces in the 16-minute instrumental "The Reptilian Brain."

 

The Ocean - Precambrian. Also known as "The Ocean Collective," this large group utilizes many vocalists and some classical instrumentation to create a unique sound. It's really heavy, but really textural. There are also some great softer parts too. This album has two discs: the first one is an EP which is all really heavy stuff and the second is a longer one which is where they make use of their huge sonic palette.

 

Also, in case you haven't checked them out, look at BTBAM and Mastodon's back catalogs. There's a lot of good material to be found there.

 

Phew, that was more than planning on typing! I hope my effort was not in vain and that it will be useful and informative.

 

Hope you like those albums!