Pretest

Let's get one thing out of the way right now - this isn't metal. There is no aggression, there is no heaviness, there is only a passing semblance of something you might call energy, there are no riffs, and the guitar tone is overdriven ever so lightly for 95% of the album. If anything, this is more like math rock in the vein of Sleeping People, only more drawn out.

Now, there is something very evident about Philadelphia trio Dysrhythmia - they love to jam. In fact, they love to jam so much that they seem to have forgotten all about the concept of song writing in the process. Their compositions wander around at mid tempo, moving through myriad metric shifts, employing traces of dissonance here and there, displaying a very strict attitude of non-repetition, and other idioms typical of the math/noise/spazz-rock world. So, the obvious question is whether or not their long-winded, meandering instrumental adventures are interesting enough to forgive the utter lack of structure. I'd say... probably not.

Drummer Jeff Eber is competent, plowing through rhythmically convoluted evolutions in a reasonably dynamic and involving style that's firmly rooted in freestyle fusion. Bassist Clayton Ingerson (since replaced by Behold... the Arctopus monster Colin Marston) is, without a doubt, skilled at his instrument of choice. Unfortunately, his bass sounds like the strings need to be lowered by about... oh, I don't know... a few inches. They are very loose and generate a rattling sound that can grate on the nerves after a while. On the upside, this approach also produces a heavy rumble that works well in offsetting what the guitars are doing. Speaking of the guitars - Kevin Hufnagel is an interesting thing. He sounds like he's in constant improv mode. Occasionally, weird and discordant noises will escape his guitar; other times, he sounds like he's trying out for a hippie jam band; the next moment, you might get the impression that he's trying to turn Dysrhythmia into the next Don Caballero; the next, he might be plowing through infuriating garage punk chord progressions; and the next, he's a total funk machine; now he has drenched his guitar in reverb and is indulging in feedback-heavy artificial harmonics in an attempt to create some kind of profound atmosphere; wait, is that a noisy wall of distortion I hear? ... All of this might seem really great and all, but in reality it's sort of annoying. The guitars just sound fucking bland. There's no power behind them, no emotion, no energy, no cohesion, no nothing. You're basically listening to a guy arbitrarily noodling away in his own little world - to these ears, it does not work.

So, basically, if you like listening to pointlessly drawn out instrumental jams that are loosely based around progressive rock and feature elements of math and noise, go ahead and get this. If you like listening to complex rhythmic work, go ahead and get this. If, however, you want something that's actually compelling and exciting, then you might want to think about looking elsewhere.