The more I think about it, the more I become convinced that Don Caballero is the best musical outlet that Pittsburgh has ever seen. Granted, that thought is contingent on the band‰’s immense influence on my musical development. Before I found Don Cab, I was invested heavily in punk and all of its offshoots ‰ÛÒ pop punk, folk punk, you name it. Don Cab is the complete antithesis of the musical structure of punk. Where punk is minimal, Don Cab is maximal. To that point, music that was maximal in the way that Don Cab is, technical, frantic, and usually indefinitely busy, only came off as pretentious masturbation of instrumental proficiency. There was nothing gorgeous in Dream Theater‰’s sweep picking or Rush‰’s overly long drum solos. When I finally became acquainted with Don Cab, my musical horizons opened like a floodgate.

Don Cab is as important to math rock as Led Zeppelin is to blues rock. The band rejected the genre label, and for good reason; their music has as much in common with post-rock and jazz as it does with math.

The steel industries of Pittsburgh feel like a sonic template for the band. The bass’ abrasive, grinding, metallic tone hammers out its notes with a violence only matched in the sheer fury of Damon Che’s drumming. The instruments collide and produce the thin treble shards of tapped guitar lines. Fixating on any single voice sounds a melodic, pointless, and repetitive, just like any single process in the factory. When viewed as an organic structure, the sum of its parts, things start to make sense. Rhythms are sporadic and tones couldn’t be more distant from one another, but the mix creates a coherent melody, harmony, and rhythm. It’s like pointillism: you can’t concentrate on the dots, you must allow your mind to unfocus from each voice to see the whole picture.

Once this picture is in mind, as disfigured as it may be, the “math” part of Don Cab’s music enters. It’s an omnipotent force that rips instruments from their grooves and forces them to find new place in the chaos. It’s as if the factory was ripped in two, but the workers took no notice and simply readjusted. It’s this violence against the very structure of their songs that makes Don Cab so exciting and unpredictable, and their ability to continue playing in the face of cataclysm that keeps each rebirth as interesting as the last.

Pretty much every Don Cab song could fit what I‰’ve described, but I chose “The World In Perforated Lines,‰” a song that initially sounds like a beautiful little Midwestern twinkly guitar band before the rest of the instruments enter. It sounds like a rain cloud covering a sunny sky, but by the end, we‰’re swept away in a hailstorm of tapped guitar notes and cymbal crashes, an unending car crash in a tornado of glass and metal.