Nebulous

Meshuggah is the heaviest band on the planet and their lyrics are very deep. I think this is my favorite song on the Nothing album because it’s so slow and ugly.

“Drowned in screaming silence, embraced by shadows, they tear me. The worm holes free my eyes.” The narrator is sitting in silence and surrounded by complete darkness. The shadows he speaks of could be many different things, dark thoughts, evil spirits or hateful memories. They tear at him, causing affliction to his present state being, but the wormholes free his eyes. A wormhole is a theoretic distortion of space-time that links one location or time to another allowing you to travel between them almost instantly. This is a metaphor for his mind or his mind’s eye taking him, by his thoughts, away from his darkened state.

“The blood boils - it knows. My thoughts burn as minds liquefy, vaporize, reality scorched by this fixed state.” He can feel the hate boil in his veins because “it” (the darkened spirit) knows he is trying to escape. Everything from his thoughts to his mind and even reality are burning from this struggle, from his “fixed state”.

“All beginnings slain by ends, I seep down into the black to breath.” This statement refers to his “fixed state,” the realization that everything dies and the only way he can cope is to “seep” into the darkness (which can mean evil thoughts or evil sprits) just to breathe.

“Drifting to merge with the past, my tongue licks the residue of the future.” He thinks of the past, of old beginnings, and he knows what the future will hold because to him all life leads to death.

“Bitter taste, the wombs of claws call me, filth rips them open, the stillborn start to move, Lidless eyes twitching beneath a sheet of rot. They reach out they want to kiss – it matters not.” It’s almost sweet to know his own future, but when it is death, the taste is bitter. He can hear the womb (comfort) of false (claws) hope calling him, but filth, or darkness “rips them open” revealing their inner evil. This is a perfect picture of how evil destroys itself. He sees the stillborn (unknowing humans) lives that float in a state of existence where their “lidless,” always open eyes endlessly receive the rot (darkness, sin), the very sheet that is draped over them all. They reach out for him, just for a “kiss” (the longing for guidance), but he knows that they do not want to hear the truth, so to him “they matter not.”

“In dreams it speaks to me, the truth that means reality.” A being or spirit visits him in his sleep, telling him the truth of life which to him is death.

SuperShredder hit it spot on. Existence is brutal, nothing else to it.