Hailing from France and featuring Klone vocalist Yann Ligner (that band’s rather good 2008 album is reviewed elsewhere on this site by yours truly) Mistaken Element take an approach best summed up as Gojira meets Meshuggah a la Melodeath, with some elements of Modern Thrash thrown into the pot. It shouldn’t cause many dropped jaws amongst the experienced readership of an advanced-level ‘zine such as this, but when done well this kind of Metal is quite enjoyable, and the fact that the band have a good sense of melody helps. Ligner may have a rough-sounding voice at first approach and the choruses are anything but radio-friendly, but they’re definitely there, and moments such as No Sound Disturbs The Silence are inescapably commercial-sounding.

Still, the likes of Lost are reminiscent of Scar Symmetry for catchy-yet-gritty Melodeath and are original enough to stand their ground against the many identikit bands out there. It’s hard not to be impressed by the steamroller groove of The Chosen One, for instance, easily challenging Gojira for dominance of the niche genre, and whilst a fair few songs, especially in the first half of the album, are a bit samey, it means that the album flows well and gives you exactly what you want from an album like this. I hesitate to call it Meshuggah-lite, as many will probably pigeonhole it, because there’s just enough quality to make it deserving of better.

All in all Mind Over Matter is a pretty solid album. Fine, there are a few filler songs; although Duality provides a slow, grinding march towards boredom, it has enough moshable riffs and well above-average drumming to keep your attention. Most songs channel the groovy Gojiran spirit well, often proving quite good at marrying it to epic song structures – Mass Machine one example – and generally it’s easy to see fans of the bands mentioned so far enjoying this, as well as it catching the ears of the Lamb Of God massive. Mistaken Element have to take a few more risks with this formula before they’ll be really worth hunting down (a bit of real brutality wouldn't go amiss) but however you run across them, whether it’s as an opening act or as a random MySpace find, they’re good enough to waste the just-over forty minutes that listening to Mind Over Matter takes.