Let me rephrase that:  "Meshuggah" is a Yiddish word meaning crazy, or so I've been told.

But who's to say that the first sentence is incorrect, especially if the tumultuous music on Chaosphere - certainly the most aptly titled album of the year - is any indication of the band's psyche.  Perhaps this is why the band chooses to close the album with the intense drone of feedback that ultimately bleeds into an aural mish-mash that has the album's songs stacked atop one another, as if walking into a room of Meshuggah fans with boom boxes and asking them to pick and play their favorite song from the CD - at the same time.  It's a palimpsest.  A clusterfuck.  But there seems to be a method to the band's madness, a strategy to make the eight songs that comprise Chaosphere seem less, well, chaotic.

Perhaps this is a good thing.  The songs of Chaosphere do at times tend to sound somewhat cacophonous.  While anyone can make noise, however, few, I would imagine, have the ability to make Meshuggah noise.  This is because beneath the veneer of hell breaking loose is a highly constructed and at times mindblowing architecture that illustrates the jaw dropping talent and musical ability that the band possesses.  To state it slightly differently, if the band is indeed a bit whacked out, it isn't the type of insanity attributed to serial killers and their brood:  cold, quiet, calculating and, in the light of day, inconspicuous.  Meshuggah is more of a Brad-Pitt-in-12-Monkeys sort of kooky: despite the twitching and stuttered speech and nervous tics that might cause many to dismiss it as being a mere noisemonger and a musical anomaly - ineffectual in its lunacy - there festers a creative genius that provides the aforementioned method to the madness.

Yet I am a bit frazzled, but not necessarily by the music and my inability to play air guitar to it.  I suppose I'm a bit baffled by the claims of the Meshuggah faithful and even some facets of the media who enthusiastically claim that the band will ultimately prove to be the saviors of Metal.  While much creativity is obvious in the vast majority of the music and even, on a less significant note, some of the song titles - "New Millennium Cyanide Christ," "The Mouth Licking What You've Bled" and "The Exquisite Machinery of Torture" my three favorites as far as song titles go - I sometimes have to wonder what muse was whispering into lead guitarist Fredrik Thordendal's ear when he was creating some of his solos.  In more than a couple of the songs, for example, he not only utilizes a frantic and schizophrenic Eddie Van Halenesque tapping style, which is fine, but he also performs these solos that consist of two, drawn out notes alternating between one another.  One, then another.  Back and forth.  Perhaps this is to give off some semblance of control amidst the chaos, a small segment of order while the rhythm section is chugging away at an intricate and bludgeoning foundation for such excursions.  Fine.  But here's the kicker:  he more often than not uses the same two notes, regardless of the song.  It's as if the band were thinking, "I'm sure the fans won't notice our self-plagiarizing if we hammer out a different rhythm part."  I, for one, noticed.  And quite frankly, it is at times annoying.  I'm sure the creative minds behind Meshuggah are more than capable of penning solos - plural - that fit into the unique structures and reflect the same emotions they wish to convey in their songs.  

For many Meshuggah represents repetition and hype, a noisy affair wrapped up in an artsy-fartsy veneer of extreme yet palatable music.  For others, Meshuggah is the prototype of twenty-first century metal, an uber-band rising above its contemporaries and predecessors in the long and varied lineage of metal and all of its subgenres.  Throw me somewhere in between, a listener who hears and appreciates the visceral explosions of energy as well as the subtleties creeping beneath the surface, but realizes that the band - while immensely talented - is in no way, shape or form messianic.