Do you like early-70’s freak-out prog like King Crimson and Henry Cow, but find yourself feeling like it’s just too organized? Are you a fan of genre-hopping spazz-core like Mr. Bungle or The Dillinger Escape Plan’s Miss Machine, yet longing for something even more frantic and disjointed? If your answer to either question was “yes,” you can pick up Grindstone right away and rest assured that my score is too low, because this album was crafted with exactly you people in mind. If you like a little more cohesion and sonic unity to your instrumental albums, approach Shining with caution.

Plying a form of hyper-talented mega-prog loosely comparable to The Mars Volta if they largely dispensed with the vocals and the Fela Kuti worship and adopted Battles’ newfound Atari-aesthetic, Grindstone is Shining’s fourth album, and it’s a mouthful. Various reviewers around the innerweb have tried to make something of their Norwegian homeland and its legions of corpsepainted bands, but Shining’s peculiar rock aesthetic has virtually nothing to do with extreme metal, the occasional surf-thrash passage notwidsthstanding. Both their brand of sax-heavy jazz-rock and their occasionally meaty riff owe more to early King Crimson than any single other influence that I hear. But, whereas even the most bloated of Robert Fripp & Co’s lengthy compositions still had the thru-line of a relatively linear song, Shining are too restless to settle in any one place for too long, too nervous and self-conscious to arrive at the destination that fully developing any one section might take them. Call it prog for the postmodern ADD set (or as they refer to it, “post-prog for the restless”).

Opening with the bristly “In the Kingdom of Kitsch You Will Be A Monster,” sneering Mike Patton-esque vocals, videogame synths, jazzy flutes, nervy Gang Of Four-styled guitars, and a snaking, constantly morphing bassline come together in an exercise in blinding Technicolor showmanship that could be this album’s “Atlas,” before yielding to the 50’s horror synths meets surf-thrash meets Bach homage meets David Lean score that is “Wintereisse,” which in turn yields to the robo-stoner riffage (think Queens of the Stone Age) of “Stalemate Logan Runner” that blends with film-noir synths, crests into a jazz fusion freakout, and then shifts into a bizarre mélange of peaceful childlike IDM overlaid with baroque harpsichord. Every song on Grindstone is the result of a similar cluster bomb of disparate influences all yoked together under an umbrella whose only coherent identity is incoherence and a tendency to veer immediately into the unexpected; trying to describe every song would only result in an unwieldy overload of name-dropping and adjectives.

When Shining does slow down enough to let some repetition surface and allow a song’s mood be the guiding element, the results are more gripping, but just as dazzling. The aggressive, sax-heavy, funk/fusion stomp of “The Red Room” puts a big smile on my face in a way that the best King Crimson does. “Psalm,” the longest track on the album, opens with a hilarious pairing of operatic vocals and vocoder, slowly drifting into an ambient vocal drone that finally builds out of its ebb into a pounding, metallic beast with the operatic vocals intact, the whole track coming across perhaps like Neurosis with a more overt sense of humor. That same sort of crumbling plod returns for the final track, “Fight Dusk With Dawn,” before moving into funky guitars, roaring saxes, and ambient drones that all finally coalesce into a huge, swaggering riff that’s almost doom in its execution. These tracks hew a more linear path than the rest of the cuts on Grindstone, and they stand out a little more for having a more defined sense of identity.

Their general refusal to let their talent and ambition take a backseat and write some actual songs is precisely what I find frustrating about Shining, but it’s also exactly what certain people will love about it. I can’t say it’s due to any lack of talent because, if I haven’t made it clear, these cats can shred—this will probably end up near the top of a short list of the more technically astounding albums I’ve heard in 2007. Their musicianship is that blend of technical proficiency and change-on-a-dime genre hopping fluidity so often labeled as “lifeless” within the prog idiom, but they rarely stick with any one sound long enough for me to check its pulse. It certainly all sounds lively enough, helped by a pristine production job that lets every instrument and electronic twitter—and there are a ton of both—come through clear and balanced. It might be impossible to figure out where this maelstrom is going, but it’s never too hard to tell what’s going on, and it’s one of the stronger aspects to Grindstone.

Taken as a whole, Grindstone strikes me as the logically extreme progression/flip side of where Battles went with Mirrored, and serves as an interesting companion piece to that album. But the devil is in the details, and although Shining is at least as talented, playful, and ambitious as math rock’s newest darlings, their restless sideways drive and inability to sit still makes them less hypnotic and, to this reviewer, less memorable after the album is done playing. But, if you got bored waiting for Mirrored to finally just cut loose the way it constantly threatened to, this is your album. Shining know their instruments inside and out, as well as their way around almost any genre you can toss at them, and Grindstone is an album that seems to effortlessly realize the strange goals it sets for itself. Those goals won’t appeal to everyone, but it’s an impressive piece of work nonetheless.

-Lucas Kane