Album review: Car Bomb – Tiles Whispers Dreams

A quarter of a century into their concussive math-metal odyssey, Car Bomb could be forgiven for running low on new ways to break necks and blow minds. Existing at the dizzying outer limits of a subgenre on heavy music’s cutting edge, they’ve routinely made tourmates as explosive as High On Fire, Code Orange or Gojira look positively poppy. But although Tiles Whispers Dreams – ground out to mark their 25th birthday and upcoming European tour – offers only three new tracks, its fire burns bright.

As a title, Tiles Whispers Dreams seems to suggest a measure of softness or quietude. It’s utterly misleading. Picking up where they left off with 2019 landmark Mordial, we’re thrust straight into the more appropriately-labelled Blindsides: a djent showcase that sounds like Meshuggah fed through a glitching supercomputer, all trademark shifting tempos, syncopated steely guitars and brain-battering percussion. Paroxysm also does what it says on the tin, somehow evoking all the anxiety-inducing claustrophobia and suffocating intensity of a panic attack. Six years away hasn’t dented their punishing precision one bit.

Careering on, the incredible title-track feels very much like the main attraction here. Evoking some sci fi horror set in a crumbling spacecraft at the far reaches of the universe, it shapeshifts from hair-raising mathcore through a passage of crossover thrash into a sludgier tech-metal dirge, then back out into an avalanche of riffs alternately metronomic and distended. Then we’re done. Abruptly. Which feels very much the point. Because as impressive as it is to so definitively underline their credentials in under 12 minutes, Tiles Whispers Dreams feels like just a tease for true fans, too, for an even more electrifying fifth album inevitably materialising down the line. Megatons of fun.

Verdict: 3/5

For fans of: The Dillinger Escape Plan, Coalesce, SikTh

Tiles Whispers Dreams is out now