Metal Underground.com

"Contradictions Collapse Reloaded" is a nice combination of material from Meshuggah's early crisp debut, "Contradictions Collapse," and slightly more refined "None" EP. They show the solid beginnings of a band that has a lot of interesting techniques and thoughts that they want to deliver to the world and the early progressions of their sound to the point where they're at today.

A surging array of sounds envelopes the listener as they take in the pummelling crescendo that overlaps them. This is the norm with Meshuggah, as they like to take somewhat repetitive patterns and ingrain them into your memory. The style is quite distinctive and gets the point across for the outfit well. Their rather jaded compositions peak in their skewed approach throughout "Contradictions Collapse," as seen from the twisted "Internal Evidence" and we can see Meshuggah having some serious fun with their approach.

Messhugah's mindset is great to witness as they go through a number of shifting states to deliver what is a great type of music to the listener. I think perhaps things came to a slightly greater refinement on "Destroy, Erase, Improve," but regardless "Contradictions Collapse" shows and exciting brand of metal being played to its highest extent. There aren’t quite as many of those moments that raise a huge pulse to be seen, but many of them do make appearances, as seen from "Erroneous Manipulation," which has a great barrage of riffing about two thirds of the way through. They certainly bring things up to a boiling point in terms of riffing chaos as can be seen many a time on the work.

While the enjoyment factor of Messhugah seems to be at an almost all time high, their older material doesn’t display the same amount of progressive flavour, yet there’s a lot of fun to be had. The one problem I have with the disc is that the band becomes slightly tedious at times. We can see from "Greed" a little bit of tiredness in their style, for example.

On "Contradictions Collapse Reloaded" we can see an approach that has its positives and negatives in terms of the repetitive nature, and this leads to different degrees of likeability depending on whether you get accustomed to the sound. The songwriting is strong enough, however. This is where the strangely timed pastures developed, so its nice to see where Meshuggah started their techniques and the bonus EP was a solid addition.