Elastic

In my opinion, this song is one of the best endings to an album. There's only a few interpretations that touch base on this album and Meshuggah's...insanity. The term "elastic" refers to the ability for an object to resume it's original shape after being stretched/distorted. The whole song seems to portray a walk into insanity and one's loss of mental stability from a foreign entity of their own creation, or undoing. Assembling dead, fragmented, and incompatible pieces to create newly regenerated life in attempt at understanding, resulted in a semi-cluster of floating, faltering thought. Inadvertently, thoughts become unthought as they are reflected/refracted upon themselves, through life and the organic normal. The view remains only through the side of the barren self, translucent from others while being reflected upon itself, visualized through light. A new entity void and inviolate of all existential standards ensues, personified by a liquid vapor cloud of thought above the barren self. The new entity swirls itself into it's own projection of life, removing the thoughts in the mind of the barren self and replacing it with static. By all standards of existence, the barren self has been undone. The song progresses in what I refer to as four states: State one refers to the lyrics. It's worth noting Jen's aggression when singing, and how it builds up to almost complete insanity by the end of the first state. Even the instrumentals create a bone chilling atmospheric effect. State two refers to what I call the descent. It resembles a descent into an unconscious state, progressing further towards a mental degradation plummet into hell. State three refers to the static. State four refers to the awakening. The whole album plays all at once in recollection, and the song ends. It seems Meshuggah emphasized heavily on pulling their concepts of each song together. From the listener's perspective, and perhaps the band's perspective, after listening to the whole album: Insanity ensues after each song comes together, forming a floating cluster of thought that is void of organic and social norms in attempts at understanding and projecting the illusion of what we call life. The light from the side of the barren self is the only thing reflecting back after listening, reflected by thousand watt obsidian bulbs. We become translucent foreign entities of our barren self because of this forming cluster of thought. The static is all we hear after descending into the pit of insanity, undone by our own doing from listening until we recollect as one from a sporadic mental overloading flashback. There's thousands of interpretations; the mind is elastic. Regardless, I still consider it to be one of Meshuggah's heaviest songs, and one of my favorite albums of all time.