[9/10 for the album; 5/10 for the reissue] Christ, yours truly could think of 10-15 albums worth reissuing off Nuclear Blast alone, so this “Reloaded” series appears to be the stroke of genius. Yeah, appears to be genius. The only difference between the initial version of Destroy.Erase.Improve and the “Reloaded” version is the addition of the hard-to-find Selfcaged EP. The rest is status quo and is maddening. Simply maddening.

We’re not going to sit here and extol the virtues of the album in question, for if you are into extreme metal of any form, than this should already be in your collection, plastic or digital. Clearly the band’s watershed album, Destroy.Erase.Improve. caught Meshuggah at the technical crossroads between the bloated prog of Contradictions Collapse and the over-zealous Chaosphere album. And the tiny melodic bits that crawl in (see the bulk of Frederick Thordendal’s solos and “Acrid Placidity”) were the perfect offset to the controlled chaos contained within.

Numbers like “Future Breed Machine,” “Soulburn,” (yes, that was the song Jack Osbourne was blaring…) “Transfixion” and the beyond-awesome “Suffer In Truth” sound remarkably fresh and innovative today, probably because no one has come close to properly aping Meshuggah’s style. Not A Life Once Lost, not Textures, heck, not even a left-field group like Gorija.

Some liner notes could have done the trick here, absolutely. NB’s American office space buddy Century Media hit the jackpot in 2001 with their series of reissues that had liner notes, new artwork, and bonus tracks, but there’s nothing of the sort here. However, there’s a handful of albums sitting in the NB vault just waiting for a reissue, so let’s hope they do us a favor and throw in some goodies. We’ll buy a second time around, but not now, economic woes be damned…

www.myspace.com/meshuggah