Yeah, I know it’s not Monday. I was working on this piece with the intent of posting it yesterday, but got sidetracked on the actual Monday morning by some provocative comments from Elise at Reign In Blonde about my weekend rant on Ke$ha. Still, I like the alliteration in the title, so what the fuck — I’m using it anyway.

And this morning I’m thinking:  Enuf about Ke$ha.  Not enuf about math metal.  Need to fix that.  And voilà! (Doesn’t mean we’re dropping the conversation with Elise.  It’s too interesting to just let it go, and I think there’s more to be said — just not right now. In the meantime, you should read her latest observations here.)

As we draw close to the end of 2009, I’ve been thinking back on some bands we haven’t written about that made the year a great one for extreme metal.  This weekend, in an (unsuccessful) effort to cleanse my mental palate of the polluting effect of “Tik Tok,” I spent time listening again to three European bands that can be classified, for want of a better term, as “math metal” — Textures, Tardive Dyskinesia, and CiLiCe — and a fourth European band I used to classify the same way that has now swum deeper into the prog metal end of the pool — Hacride.

All four have often drawn comparisons with Meshuggah. Occasionally, some writers have even branded them as Meshuggah derivatives. Unfair criticism!  They each have their own sound, successfully blending highly technical instrumental work with melody, and they each produced awesome albums in 2009. [Correction: the Textures album was released in 2008.] (More after the jump — including streaming songs from each band) Continue reading »