Alright, it's confession time. I am one of the dozens of hapless people who's purchased tickets for Ozzfest each of the last three years. Yes, I was one of the people who spent $6 on a plastic goldfish bowl full of yeast-flavored piss last year hoping to make forty-five minutes of Chester Bennington more palatable. But, aside from attracting what Bill Hicks might have referred to as America's greatest anti-culture trainwreck, Ozzfest has been the only successful metal festival in the United States.
Other than boasting the weakest lineup the festival had seen in the spring and summer of 2002, this white trash cash cow was marred by everything from Sharon Osbourne's colon cancer (and Ozzy's subsequent defection), to the accidental death of Drowning Pool frontman Dave Williams, to Zakk Wylde collapsing on stage during a European stop. In spite of these tragedies-- or perhaps because of them-- Sweden's Meshuggah found themselves thrust to the critical forefront of a lineup sporting names like System of a Down, Andrew WK, Adema, and Rob Zombie. When an erroneously named metal festival suddenly cow-tows to MTV's favorite faux-angst trendkill the results promise to be disastrous.
Following a mind-numbing thirty-five minutes from that Mötley Crüe guy with a huge cock, I happened to overhear a conversation between two Abercrombie & Fitch-clad metalheads standing a few inches in front of me:
Yuppie Spawn 1: "Yeah, those guys were okay but they weren't nearly as hard as P.O.D are gonna be. You've seen their video for 'Youth of the Nation', right? Word. That's deep. And that Christian shit is off the hook."
Other than serving as a sweeping argument for the decline of western civilization, this conversation seems to echo the bastardization that has beset heavy music in recent years and, to an extent, forever. For better or worse, watered-down minor key riffs with coherent vocals have become a fixture of the alternative metal scene. Meshuggah fly directly in the face of the status quo where mainstream metal is concerned, albeit in a way that's guaranteed to send our Abe & Fitch pals screaming for their Paxil. Sure, Meshuggah's 2002 release, Nothing, doesn't redefine artistic parameters-- this band is not about innovation. Sweden's seminal metal amalgam has remained true to their ideology since forming in 1987, churning out beefy, intricate hard rock songs with off-kilter tempos, ample polyrhythms, and caustic vocals. Incorporating elements of Pantera, Cannibal Corpse, Immolation, and Nile, Nothing is decidedly all Meshuggah for fifty solid minutes.
Refining their sound to a more relaxed musical approach than recent efforts Destroy Erase Improve and Chaosphere, Meshuggah have retained all of their muscle but with more spacious arrangements. "Straws Pulled at Random" spotlights the band's talent for hammering out precise cadence amidst waves of ambient eight-string guitar tonalities and slowly morphing repetitiveness. Guitarist Frederik Thordendal slips into an eerie romantic solo while drummer Tomas Haake, bassist Gustaf Hielm, and rhythm guitarist Mårten Hagström lock into a frenetic groove. As the rhythm section's dissonance grows, Thordendal's harmonics evolve masterfully, challenging the listener to dissociate melody from repetition.
"Rational Gaze" builds upon a similar dynamic with the guttural sludge of vocalist Jens Kidman occupying a more significant share of the canvas, similar in style to Slayer's Tom Araya circa Hell Awaits. Although speed is sacrificed (a stark contrast to other bands of their ilk), Meshuggah relies on 7/4 tempos and muted chromatics to create a feeling of kinetic energy without deviating radically from a rigid, percussive structure. Again, Thordendal provides the melodic counterpoint with solos that seemingly deconstruct the band's groove and inject an entirely new dimension of high-frequency atonality.
"Perpetual Black Second" pounds through a spasmodic grind of alternating buildups and breakdowns, teasing resolution. Drummer Tomas Haake is the complete opposite of many of his metal counterparts-- it's his respect for groove that keeps Meshuggah accessible. Where most metal drummers would attempt to dazzle with blistering kickdrums and heart-stopping licks, Haake is confident enough in his feel and sense to employ a minimalist philosophy, thus providing the rest of the band room to establish patterns without the threat of a drum deluge.
Taking the notion of rigidity to another level, "Closed Eye Visuals" finds Haake exercising subtle polyrhythm against Nothing's most methodic and brutal attack. Almost as certain as the track is to test the patience of its listeners (clocking in at 7\xBD minutes), the track represents Meshuggah's most challenging offering to date. Muscling through a blitzkrieg of nuanced textures and tones, Thordendal finds himself in full Dimebag Darrell mode as the stilted rhythm throbs and undulates beneath him. Here, Meshuggah display their obvious progressive metal instincts, cementing ambient drones against a wall of seething power chords.
Owing in part to the Philip K Dick-flavored lyrics, Meshuggah have found themselves lumped among the ranks of "math-metal" fodder like Soilent Green, Coalesce, and the Dillinger Escape Plan. There's little doubt that Meshuggah is attempting to paint a fairly bleak landscape of technology run amok. Unfortunately for the band, the banal and often garbled language detracts from their talent. On "Organic Shadows", we have, "My mind resigns to defeat/ Internal razors activated/ Slashing through unprocessed thought/ The severance of self complete," lines that could easily have been authored by Poppy Z Brite, and the cringe-worthy "Bitter taste/ The wombs of claws call me/ Filth rips them open/ The stillborn start to move lidless eyes twitching beneath a sheet of rot.../ They reach out, they want to kiss/ It matters not..." from "Nebulous". Still, aside from the ponderous corpse paint-soaked sci-fi schlock, Meshuggah have unleashed what amounts to a viciously crafted effort without the rampant pretension of their intellectual metal brothers.
