Math rock’s biggest flaw was always its tendency to attract soulless virtuosos with no concept of how to write anything remotely memorable.
Waves of interchangeable bands playing wilfully intricate music have come and gone over the years, but Dysrhythmia have remained distinct and proudly idiosyncratic, lurking on the fringes of a familiar sound but never stooping so low as to borrow its ideas.
Like everything the Philadelphia trio have recorded, The Veil Of Control is initially bewildering but, after repeated listens, so weirdly fascinating that it could potentially drive you mad. It’s just that no one else makes music quite like this. The jazzy detours, scattershot rhythms and wildly progressive structures are all common elsewhere, but somewhere between guitarist Kevin Hufnagel’s mastery of discord and the rhythm section’s razor-sharp interplay, something utterly alien emerges, from the title track’s blizzard of rapid beats to the slower, Voivod-ian pastures of the unsettling Sever
