7/2009 - Drawing Circles is one of those albums that waddles along, unsuspectingly, grows in size until it eclipses the sun, trips over an overpass as it takes its first steps, and crushes every bone in your body as it mutters an "ow" or an "oops." It's the bastard son of Devin Townsend and Meshuggah after a long night of hard liquor and being lost in some long-forgotten desert. If "technical metal" or "progressive metal of the non-wanky kind" sounds yummy, pour this album in some Tupperware and dig in.
2/2010 - Because I hate the old blurb I wrote for Drawing Circles, and because that album isn't this band's only great opus, I've decided to delete the old post and re-post the whole damn discography seven months later.
Textures was probably the first band I got into that sounded like Meshuggah, but wasn't Meshuggah. As cold and mechanical as their debut, Polars, is, it's still somehow warmer than the bloodcurdling clockwork that is Contradictions Collapse through obZen. It definitely has something to do with Eric Kalsbeek, a man who, languid in voice and vehement in harsher-than-voice, tames the wild poly-rhythms around him with his effortless talents; or, it could be the drummer, Stef Broks, and his ability to not only play in pre-prepared Fibonacci spirals, but also add tons of syncopation, which, in a way, kind of gives a soul to the entire band. Broks doesn't make a huge habit of using rolling double-bass patterns, so when he does utilize them, it gets the point across really fucking well.
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