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Meshuggah: ObZen
24/10/08 || The Duff
Meshuggah was one of the first extreme metal bands I ever got into, as the first time I heard “Future Breed Machine” I was floored, later buying “Destroy. Erase. Improve.” and discovering a unique and brilliant band that blended an unusual creativity with clusterfucking heaviness. My standards were set lower back in the summer of ’01 (surely Winter, Ravendark Frostbiteonmenuts?), as I even worshiped the slightly undervalued “Chaosphere” – an album I reckon is far from perfect yet still manages to deliver in terms of what preceded it while developing on past sounds. That is pretty much the template to every successive Meshuggah album – to evolve from past efforts while just about keeping the one aspect most easily identifiable as your groundwork, in this band’s case, polyrhythms. These guys even manage to show tech death bands how it’s done, and yet on a technical front, this stuff can be incredibly withdrawn.
Most of what followed “Chaosphere” was good, if only a little ho-hum in terms of the all-amazing classic “D.E.I.”; then we get to “Catch 33”, a complete album, one-track monstrosity that I’ve yet to comprehend the adoration over. Ever since its release, praise for Meshuggah has only made me want to forget them more; I can only think of one other band that has made me so easily treat even its classic period with such disdain (behold the wrath of Frostbiteonmenuts) – we all know of which band I speak. This new one is, in brief, not so much an evolutionary step as with past efforts, but a conglomeration of all that has passed, and very positive reviews of the album made me think it was time I stop bunching my panties tightly around my scrotum every time a band does something I disagree with. In short (yeah, I wasted a minute of your life), Meshuggah are back on track to making me rock out to groovy, oddly-timed thrash; the most since the obliterating “D.E.I.”.
I’m going to say it, so brace yourselves: the moment that made me think “Holy fuck-ballz!” was “Bleed”; the track is absolutely killer, practically re-inventing the polyrhythmic chug riff – this basically means that Meshuggah have gone on to do their own thing all this time, allowing other bands to fail at bettering a sound they pioneered, only to surpass it themselves many years on down the line, when they could be fucked, so to speak. The rest of the album takes a while longer to truly sink in, but if you’re a fan of something like tech death, it shan’t be the arrangements that keep you enthralled but the quality of the music, something which “ObZen” delivers upon in spades.
All the tedium from past albums, the slow-paced, atmospheric picking of single notes with some lazy bending, the clean sections that went absolutely nowhere, the oddly-timed chug-riffs with nothing but mind-bendingly complicated rhythms, and the lethargic nature symbolizing the “new” Meshuggah sound has been removed, even if all the ingredients allowing such tedium to arise in the first place kept much the same; the sluggish pace of “Nothing”, the one-track droning monotony of the abysmal “Catch 33” and finally, the not-so fantastic thrashiness of “Chaosphere” have all been re-vitalized with the energy of their most classic period, in part due to their recent mastery of the eight-string (I’m truly sold on the instrument after hearing this album, whereas before it all seemed very pointless), as well as due to the reverting more towards groove-ridden terrain.
In the end, it’s tough to grasp any Meshuggah album, and “ObZen” continues the band’s development in such a fashion, but what’s best with this album is that it is a very fun record, despite the nihilistic atmosphere that permeates throughout – if you don’t fully understand whatever’s going on, you can at the very least enjoy the music, whereas on recent past outputs it felt like seconds of your life were being lost to the ever-changing patterns lacking that all important degree of musicality. This is without a doubt their best album since “Destroy. Erase. Improve.”; thrashier, groovier, a lot more direct and not so much prancing about trying to defy the rules of the Universe, Meshuggah are still very much progressive, as they’re undeniably one of the only bands to be able to completely devote their art to polyrhythm riffing and still remain quite a standard heavy metal band – these guys are back to showing their followers how it’s done while finally coming around and releasing another entirely brilliant effort.
8 blood-covered zen poses out of 10.
- Information
- Released: 2008
- Label: Nuclear Blast
- Website: www.meshuggah.net
- Band
- Fredrik Thordendal: guitar, bass
- Mårten Hagstrom: guitar, bass
- Tomas Haake: drums
- Jens Kidman: vocals
- Tracklist
- 01. Combustion
- 02. Electric red
- 03. Bleed
- 04. Lethargica
- 05. ObZen
- 06. This spiteful snake
- 07. Pineal gland optics
- 08. Pravus
- 09. Dancers to a discordant system
