Nightmare Fuel / Meshuggah

• By default, most of Meshuggah's music is scary to listen to: churning guitars tuned slightly above a bass guitar, indecipherable screams, the liberal use of Mood Whiplash, and rather nightmarish lyrics, usually about death, technology, or some combination thereof. What truly is terrifying, however, is their video for "Bleed"; random cuts between a disheveled man, a dying insect, a blood-stained man chained to a wall, and something that looks like an evil albino Shiva, all over a riff that manages to sputter along in not quite 4/4, which just adds to the unnerving "I should be able to see a pattern here" part of the brain.
• Some other examples include "New Millenium Cyanide Christ" especially when reading the lyrics along with it and imagine them, about a man who ruins himself to become a cyborg demi-god in order to lead the human race to a similar fate. (despite the video being intentionally hilarious) The note bending riffs towards the end are spine chilling. Also worth mentioning is near the middle of the very long 1 song EP I, where it has a very strange sounding acoustic section deliberately off key and sounding like a broken ice cream truck jingle, then the scariest, most furious intense riff of the song bursts out of nowhere...
• Another potent example is "Mind's Mirrors" off of Catch Thirtythree. Listen to that in a dark room alone, and try not to get freaked out, especially with the extra low, distorted bass in the beginning. Brrr.....
• "Elastic"; the song starts out like any other Meshuggah song, but ends in a breakdown/solo thing with a dreadful-sounding guitar, then devolves into about 6 minutes of drone ambiance, then proceeds to play every previous song off of the album Chaosphere (including the aforementioned New Millennium Cyanide Christ)...at once. This extremely sudden Mood Whiplash (not to mention the whole song itself) can be very disorienting and unbearable
• The heaviest, most intense and overwhelming set of riffs the band has ever written appears out of nowhere after a half-second break in "Demiurge". It is extremely jarring for those unfamiliar with the song's structure.
• The music video for "I Am Colossus" takes the song's already disturbing subject matter and throws in masked, nun-shaped shadow monsters draining something from helpless, bound captives to create the titular Colossus, all shown in stark black-and-white Marionette Motion for good measure.

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