4 out of 5

Label: Relapse

Produced by: Steve Albini

Let’s agree on one stone cold fact: Bastard, the first track on Dysrhythmia’s Pretest, is one of the best opening tracks of all time.  I don’t care if your tastes run power pop, or top ten radio, or classical: Dose your playlist with that track and you’ll trade in your nebbish library attire and formal wear and associate degrees for a ratty tee shirt and a permanent crook to your hands in the shapes of devil horns.  This is unassailable.  It is truth.  Steve Albini earned his paycheck with this single song – the churning lows, the arena-filling reverb – and Dysrhythmia earned, in me, a fan for life.

The followup to this album, , followed somewhat in Pretest’s Relapse records worship of grit and heft, but under Colin Marston’s direction, their sound – already complex – became focused on being moreso.  The line in the sand between that era and this album is pretty clear, and it’s very much a line between Steve’s live, raw sound and something a bit more cleaned up (though both are with minimal tweaks and recorded in a studio, of course).  And as good as our opening track here is, that same Albini impulse perhaps prevents the disc from reachieving the same high thereafter.  In pursuit of a jam, straight-to-tape effect, the disc has a couple of lows where the riffs feel like they tread water a bit.  It’s still dammed impressive stuff, just more standard sounding.  And ending in the ten minute, anti-climactic Touch Benediction is sort of a bummer, no matter.how good and crisp those drums sound.

But look at that rating: Four out of five.  We’re not spared a shit ton of excellent rock elsewhere on this disc, from the fast and furious My Relationship, to the groove and headbangery of Heat Sink, to the fantastic build and release of the two part Annihilation.  Pretest undeniably makes an impression, with or without that first song.

Now knowing the technical metal path of wizardry down which they’d walk, it’s a fun refresher to revisit this early album, hearing the group’s metal spin on blowing your mind.