Future Breed Machine
MESHUGGAH
About This Project
Motivation arises from various places within a song. Sometimes lyrics with meaning can push people to do better. Sometimes futuristic narratives can do that. And sometimes it’s just the melody or the music alone that elevates the mind to a new place.
Meshuggah tends to hit home with at least 2 if not 3 of these. Their music is like a food you’ve never tasted before. They helped start a new genre of math-metal by using “unusual and off-time” polyrhythms, polymetered riff cycles, rhythmic syncopation, rapid key and tempo changes and neo-jazz chromatics with heavy metal. If you take progressive death metal and put it in a blender with jazz-style arrangements, then add in hardcore and death metal vocal styling, you’ll discover this band. Needless to say, there’s a lot to digest with this band—they are quite dynamic. At first listen, you might find yourself not understanding it or even not finding the beat, but wait a moment. Just wait and it all connects… eventually. Guitars might play in odd meters such as 5/16 or 17/16, while drums play in 4/4 time. Then out of no where, the loud distorted song might get quiet and calm.
Future Breed Machine is the first song I heard (and probably still my favorite) by them. The machine-like percussion pattern of all instruments at the beginning establish the base for this foreboding track. The lyrics read like a cross between the “surrealistically oppressive school system” of Pink Floyd’s The Wall mixed with the Matrix. Personal interpretation of this track is that people in power can easily brainwash and control people if they aren’t careful and cautious to what is around them. Read between the lines, pay attention, and think for yourself. In this poster, and in my humble opinion, Americans have become a slave to the TV. It controls their lives, day-in and day-out.
LIVE VIDEO /
SONG /
LYRICS /
An even strobe, a pulse of flashing hatelights
of synthetic souls — mass produced: hammered into shape.
A sign of the times, dreams turn into systems.
A new way, a new breed, implanted in our minds.
Here I am in the hand of a sterile hate.
The new control, I cannot wake. I’m not asleep!
New intelligence arise in emptied bodies.
Turgid flesh tested through eternal spastic fits.
Through not known codes, Mother-Machine in genocide.
Now scorn a dying race
Evolution in reverse.
Now it’s time for me.
Changing: what am I to be?
Contorted: an eternity!
Defeated.
Programmed to appease you, we’re symbols of perfection.
Humanoids run by your laws: Destroy. Erase. Improve.
Lesson first: Submission. We’re docile servant dogs.
Our leashes are your limbs, computed deep within.
Remolded minds controlled our thoughts.
No more doubts, the new way is here!
Disgorged: another thousand fakes
that obey to a circuit skein to vacuum.
Mechanical thoughts I now conceive.
No longer me, always to see: inanity.
Millions to be, units like me: eternally.
Human patterns copied, dissected and distorted.
Completed to fit the machine.
The nerve fibers give in to chords to the unknown.
See me, be me!
Same contents, same machine!
The currency of ours no more.
Flesh and bone we are to be.
Unaware of what we have been before.
Evolution in reverse
Now it’s time for me
Changing: what am I to be?
Contorted: an eternity!
Defeated: by the new machine.