Meshuggah - The Impossible Balance Between Order and Chaos

Madness as an extreme state of mind, as a horizon of human experience and the result of an annihilating sonic overstimulation. Meshuggah, one of the most important and influential metal acts straddling the two millennia, chose their name echoing the Yiddish term used to define madness itself.

Contradictions and cages.

Meshuggah's prehistory begins in 1985, a year before extreme metal exploded with the masterpieces "Reign In Blood" (Slayer), "Master Of Puppets" (Metallica) and "Rust In Peace" (Megadeth). Fredrik Thordendal, a Swedish guitarist, puts together a band called Metallien. That first lineup's run ends quickly, but the urge to play doesn't fade. In 1987, another Swedish kid, Jens Kidman, chooses the name Meshuggah for his band. Curiously, it's Kidman himself who leaves this first incarnation of Meshuggah in order to form another band, Calipash, recruiting former Metallien guitarist Fredrik Thordendal, bassist Peter Nordin and drummer Niklas Lundgren. In the end, the name Calipash is dropped in favor of the far more charismatic Meshuggah.

Thus arrives, in 1989, the first EP, officially known simply as Meshuggah but remembered in history as Psykisk Testbild because of its curious cover art. Listening back to it today, it's a trio of tracks useful for tracing the band's stylistic origins, but decidedly immature.

"Cadaverous Mastication" rests on a linear midtempo that will remain largely absent for the rest of their career, steeped in speed and thrash-metal references on the level of Metallica and Anthrax, which only occasionally show ambitions to outdo the genre's classics in complexity. "Sovereigners Morbidity", faster, recalls the onslaughts of Testament, while "The Debt Of Nature" swings forcefully back to evoking Metallica. The amateurish production, a vocal delivery still lacking bite, and an uncertain, often generic rhythm section suggest that in 1989 it was hard to imagine just how influential Meshuggah would become in the decades to come.

The EP Meshuggah is the only one in which the lineup doesn't feature drummer Tomas Haake behind the kit, as he joined in 1990 replacing Niklas Lundgren. The first year of the decade is also when debut album Contradictions Collapse came out. The band's sound starts from the fiercest eighties-style thrash-metal, but the new tracks already show how incapable the four Swedes are of staying within the genre's boundaries. This debut only offers a pale hint of what their future evolution would be, but the more attentive listener can already spot a few elements that, once fully developed, would become defining traits. "Paralyzing Ignorance" and "Internal Evidence" feature mid-range screams, eclectic, surgical percussion, monolithic riffs and an apocalyptic atmosphere that would later become a trademark.

"Erroneus Manipulation" is split by a brief atmospheric pause and flaunts one of their metallic-toned bass lines. "Qualms Of Reality" extends the atmospheric interlude into a jazz-scented passage, an element that would often return in later albums. "Abnegating Cecity" boasts one of the first pyrotechnic solos of their career, immediately followed by a deranged polyrhythm, stop-start riffs and a rhythmic emphasis shared by every instrument: it's the first classic of their career. A spasmodic tension grips the album in its coils.

This debut fails to bring out all the band's qualities, still too unoriginal and certainly not helped by the average song length, which often exceeds six minutes and still lives off thrash-metal clichés.

The great leap forward can be glimpsed on the following EP, None (1994). Kidman, meanwhile, had decided to focus exclusively on vocals, so Mårten Hagström became the new rhythm guitarist. Compared to what was heard three years earlier, the sound has evolved into something substantially new. Not only more complex rhythmically, but marked by an unprecedented density: whereas before polyrhythms and solos alternated, now they tend to overlap; whereas before songs stretched out to make room for connective compositional elements, now there's no respite for the listener; whereas before melodic moments were kept separate from the more violent ones, now they're stacked into dystopian visions full of oxymorons.

Rhythmic richness is probably the most striking element: guitars, bass and drums carve out mutant, tentacular grooves that resolve into geometries that are complex to follow and even harder to play. Haake is the band's true director, the puppeteer who keeps order at the eye of the storm (just listen to "Gods Of Rapture").

Kidman, freed from guitar duty, finds his vocal style in a claustrophobic scream that never really offers release, driven by a controlled rage that's contained and caged within the band's surgical structures (listen to "Sickening"). The two guitars and the bass are tasked with outlining the intricate harmonic and melodic machinery, while also responding to the songs' explosive demands, miraculously managing to carve out room for expression.

The EP closes with an extended track that dwarfs everything else on the release: "Aztec Two-Step" (almost 11 minutes, with a 5-minute silent ending) is a nightmare that blends thrash-metal, death-metal and industrial distortion to stage a sonic torture in which Kidman sacrifices himself through sheer screaming, the guitars warp monstrously, and the drums unleash terrifying explosions. The first two and a half minutes are an abyss of despair and pain, then a death-metal groove fills the entire sonic spectrum. What follows sees that power channeled into a rhythm that recalls hip-hop beats. Before the four-minute mark, everything falls silent, only to suddenly kick back in amid a thrash-death storm, and then, after another brief pause, remain at the mercy of Kidman's echoing, distorted screams. Such devastation, such a terrifying sonic assault, closes with 5 minutes of silence.

Another EP, Selfcaged (1995), contains 4 tracks, one of which is the already familiar "Gods Of Rapture". The opener "Vanished" is a gem of their technical, progressive thrash-death, a composition marked by an airy, futuristic interlude followed by Eastern melodies, supersonic, jazz-influenced guitar solos and devastating new rhythmic combinations that pummel the listener relentlessly.

"Suffer In Truth" is one of Kidman's finest moments, as in the finale he reverts to a more conventional vocal style, albeit exaggeratedly anguished. "Inside What's Within Behind" opens with the most disorienting polyrhythm on the record, evoking the sick, depressive sounds of alternative-metal in its second half.

Destruction and chaos.

When the band finally arrives at an album that develops this new style over the long haul, the result is a record that marks a turning point in history. Destroy Erase Improve (1995) is a watershed moment for extreme metal. On the album, Meshuggah paint a very distinctive and wide-ranging stylistic palette. Rhythm remains the protagonist, in its most unpredictable mutations and most convoluted structures, steering the songs toward unexpected pauses, sudden shifts and devastating onslaughts. The complexity is such that the listener has to dive deep into the arrangements to anticipate the next blast, learning to decode signs, cycles and repetitions within such an intricate compositional design.

The songs are like arcane mathematical equations that, surprisingly, end up arriving at a precise result: within the chaos of sonic elements, some kind of logic can slowly be discerned, bordering on the ungraspable, a sort of superhuman order within the chaos. Meshuggah's music isn't exactly explosive, it doesn't depict a liberating release of energy. Rather, as Destroy Erase Improve clearly shows, it's music full of tension, which restrains and cages just as much as it detonates and releases: the effort of every song is to hold up this precarious balance between order and chaos, between repression and release.

"Future Breed Machine", the opener, is one of their masterpieces. A headlong charge, always on the verge of surrendering to blind fury yet held in check by solid, intricate structures made of dizzying polyrhythms. Kidman, screaming ferociously yet with total discipline, perfectly embodies the track's essence: extremely violent yet intelligent, brutal yet refined. The bleak instrumental passage depicts dystopian, inhuman scenarios, the rhythmic machine-gun bursts that merge with the whirling jazz solo are a visionary addition to the bleak picture, and the concluding restart is the band's ultimate, final display of power, with Kidman shrieking in a strained high note that's a gem of pain, anguish and rage.

"Beneath" dials back the impact to better depict desert-like, desolate landscapes through the guitars, but "Soul Burn", despite its moderate pace, starts pummeling the listener again with an armored rhythm and climbs toward a climax that has something of free-jazz abstraction about it. Guitar interplay and exchanges with the bass remain the focal point of songs like "Transfixion", while the instrumental "Acrid Placidity" explores the more stretched-out, atmospheric substratum of their music, the one closest to post-rock. "Terminal Illusions" matches the paroxysmal intensity of "Future Breed Machine", something "Sublevels" only partly achieves, weaving in desolate melodies, a dying man's spoken delivery and abstract rhythms around yet another explosion of controlled rage.

As a complement to the musical side, Meshuggah's lyrics grow progressively more visionary, and far more distinctive than the stereotyped ones of their early days. Anguished visions of abominable machines ("Future Breed Machine"), psychological nightmares ("Transfixion"), bleak reflections ("Suffer In Truth") and distressing dreamlike scenarios ("Sublevels") outline an imagery that fuses the expressive force of death metal with intimate introspection and reflection — another of the impossible syntheses the band keeps pursuing.

The following EP, The True Human Design (1997), contains the impressive "Sane", a track that stays in the wake of Destroy Erase Improve while flaunting a more spectacular production, complete with stereo panning tricks. The rest of the tracklist is crowded with alternate versions of the masterpiece "Future Breed Machine": a live version introducing new bassist Gustaf Hielm; an excessively long-winded industrial-death-metal mutation; a goofy acoustic take titled "Future Bread Machine" and labelled the "campifre version"; and a full two drum'n'bass versions.

Suited only to completists, this EP is nonetheless the band's first flirtation with electronics, an element that would prove crucial to some of their future work.

When the follow-up to Destroy Erase Improve arrives in 1997, it manages to replicate that same sense of disorientation. The ominous title alone, Caosphere, hints at its complexity and devastating power. Either way, it's hard to come prepared for the opener, "Concatenation": no introduction, you're immediately hurled into the eye of a claustrophobic tornado, where scattered cymbal and snare hits only add to the disorientation. After a minute the track seems on the verge of an imminent explosion, as if about to dissolve into a long tail of assorted cacophony, but instead finds the strength to pull itself back together and start the cycle again. At the two-minute mark, amid a stuttering rhythm, the guitar is mangled into lacerating wails. The finale brushes up against white noise, launching into a ride that explodes with every step, while Kidman screams as if being tortured.

Next up, another striking track: "New Millennium Cyanide Christ", a polyrhythmic nightmare in which an inspired Kidman raps like a man possessed, balanced precariously in the middle of a storm of guitar shrapnel and amid the spectacular solos that color its desolate landscapes. At the four-minute mark, a deafening, oppressive wall suddenly rises up, topped off by harrowing screams: these are moments of rare intensity, not dampened in the least by the dissonances that follow.

The third track and third gem, "Corridor Of Chamaleons" thrives on apocalyptic rhythmic jolts of surgical precision, solos that desperately claw their way above the bulldozing polyrhythms, and further moments where Kidman indulges his extreme rap-metal side. "Neurotica" partly returns to the sound of the previous album, albeit with another tormented, caterwauling guitar solo, but it's only a temporary truce, since "The Mouth Licking What You've Bled" propels the most chaotic, jagged, violent of their polyrhythms.

"The Exquisite Machinery Of Torture", with Haake on vocals, nods even more explicitly to rap, closely recalling Korn. The finale is entrusted to the behemoth "Elastic" (fifteen and a half minutes), a tormented sonic serpent full of hideous dissonances that morph into a deafening feedback stretching on for several minutes, at the end of which the assault resumes at double speed and with a violence fierce enough to make even the rest of the album's tracks pale by comparison.

Progressive metal, thrash metal and death metal are essential ingredients in Meshuggah's formula, but jazz, hip-hop, funk, prog-rock and math-rock surface within the folds of their sonic siege. Innovative, experimental, extreme in both ideas and form, their stylistic blend would go on to spawn a new metal subgenre called djent, an onomatopoeia meant to evoke the dark, dissonant sound of the guitars. Haake's anguished, visionary lyrics reach new peaks of dystopian horror, hitting a macabre high point on "New Millennium Cyanide Christ".

It takes a full three years for the band to release the compilation Rare Trax (2001), good for completists, but also interesting for its first experiment with a programmed drum machine, the powerhouse "War" that opens the collection. In 2001 bassist Hielm leaves the band, which temporarily goes back to being a quartet.

The fourth album, Nothing (2002), sounds like the first real stumble in a career that had, until then, been hurtling toward one thrilling revolution after another. Slower and more orderly, it's marked by a less frightening sound. The longest track, "Closed Eye Visuals", recalls a more rarefied — and ultimately less violent — Destroy Erase Improve. For listeners used to the density of the previous albums, tracks like "Organic Shadows" feel all too sparse. Curiously, "Spasm" features another rap, again courtesy of Haake.

The album's merit lies in bringing to light a more human conception of groove, funk-metal rather than jazz, as is evident on "Nebulous". The closer, "Obsodian", is telling: no vocals, no accelerations, its sonic spectrum dominated by dissonant guitars and, above all, no polyrhythms whatsoever.

A transitional album, Nothing represents one of the paths taken by the band after the one-two punch of Destroy Erase Improve and Caosphere — the less experimental route, one that refines the sound rather than the composition, returning to groove instead of pushing the rhythms toward ever more monstrous, inhuman territory. Nothing would be reissued in 2006 in a version that saw the band wielding fearsome eight-string guitars, one of the new millennium's signature fetishes.

The next EP, I (2004), contains a single, colossal 21-minute track that opens with a polyrhythmic weave that could have come straight out of the usual Destroy Erase Improve. In less than two minutes, however, the intensity multiplies tenfold, and as if by magic, a few seconds later the track has reassembled itself into a standard-issue djent bloodbath.

Mutation after mutation, driven by one of the sharpest rhythm sections in the history of metal, Meshuggah pummel the listener with thunderous midtempos and scorching accelerations, like the one that assaults the eardrums between the fifth and sixth minute, propelled by a blistering guitar.

Among other things, there's a dissonant break, extremely groovy slowdowns, cacophonous free-jazz solos, bleak post-metal arpeggios and a suffocating finale, with murky guitar melodies and annihilating rhythmic thuds.

I takes a different path from Nothing, writing the band's longest and most complex track, even if it fails to reinvent their sound.

The third of the post-Caosphere experiments is Catch Tirtythree (2005), a long 13-part suite, played with the aid of a programmed drum machine and arguably a concept album, at least on a lyrical level. Following the rhythmic focus of Nothing and the complex structure of I, this suite could have been the ideal starting point for a new stylistic phase. The problem is that the suite's various parts are more a record-label gimmick than anything else: "Autonomy Lost", "Imprint Of The Un-Saved" and "Disenchantment" are simply one long track in the style of Destroy Erase Improve and Caosphere; the extremely violent "The Paradoxical Spiral" finds a tense interlude in "Re-Enaminate" and a fairly bland conclusion in "Entrapment". The vocoder on "Mind's Mirrors" makes more of a stir, though it's a shame it's the only notable element of the track.

The most curious moment is "In Death – Is Death", a tormented thirteen-and-a-half-minute piece that sweeps through all their tortured rhythmic and harmonic ideas, folding jazz back in through an unusually hushed interlude and closing with a long instrumental passage where the guitars explore post-metal landscapes in a desolate atmosphere. The coda of "Sum" is even more feeble, with guitar flourishes that arrive with no precise rhythm. The fury of Caosphere only returns on "Dehumanization".

Overall, Catch Tirtythree is a confused album, one that reshuffles and recycles ideas without managing to make the long-awaited leap toward a credible post-Caosphere style.

Meshuggah's evolution has been so rapid and sensational that it dwarfs works like Nothing, I and Catch Tirtythree. After two albums that changed extreme metal, Nothing scaled back the complexity of the compositions, I attempted the path of a definitive, mammoth composition, and Catch Tirtythree tried out, in rough fashion, a new compositional form that the band embraced half-heartedly. Even with their limitations, though, the post-Caosphere tracks don't dent the band's privileged standing, which in the meantime had become well known and respected within the metal scene. In 1999 Meshuggah followed Slayer on tour across the United States and later joined Tool on the road as well.

Although he doesn't appear on their most recent work, the band has had a new bassist since 2004, Dick Lövgren, whose name features prominently in the credits of obZen (2008). The album is unusually straightforward by their standards ("Combustion", "Pravus") and too often recalls what's already been heard in the past ("Electric Red", "Lethargica"). The band still commands a style all their own ("obZen") and on these tracks they favored the roar of groove, as on Nothing ("This Spiteful Snake", with Kidman spewing rage). The lengthy "Dancers To A Discordant System" revives the power of I across ten minutes, though it can't match its colossal proportions, complexity and shapeshifting development. The only track worthy of their classics is the staggering "Bleed", a new mechanical contraption of earthquaking polyrhythms that adds a fresh element to their dystopian anthems.

After obZen, a future as institutions of extreme metal seems to beckon. Having abandoned the career's riskiest choices, Meshuggah settled into a style that owes much to Destroy Erase Improve and Nothing, shedding the abstraction, disorienting experimentation and that knack for renewing extreme music. This impression is confirmed by Koloss (2012), which makes only incidental tweaks to the formula. "The Demon's Name Is Surveillance" shows off brighter-sounding guitars, the palette has grown darker and less robotic, and the thunderous production booms louder than in the past. "Break Those Bones Whose Sinews Gave It Motion", with its brutally pounding rhythm and distant guitars painting vast, desolate landscapes, proves that Meshuggah are still masters of their own game, able to crush the listener under the weight of their terrifying music even when they forgo labyrinthine geometries and relentless accelerations.

Kidman has progressively sharpened the expressiveness of his mid-range scream, as well demonstrated by the roar of "Behind The Sun". Here too, some moments are relatively straightforward, like the devastating "The Hurt That Finds You First", closed out by an atmospheric coda that slides into a mysterious tribal dance. This time, the track that deserves a place among their best is called "Swarm", a terrifying, relentless rhythmic exercise, torn open by jagged guitar interjections and a cacophonous free-jazz solo, closed by an evocative coda that once again conjures post-apocalyptic worlds.

The brief EP Pitch Black (2013) contains an interesting title track, which dips back into rap and flaunts the most chaotic and abstract of their guitar solos. The release is rounded out by a forgettable live version of "Dancers To A Discordant System".

More than three more years pass before Meshuggah return with new material. The Violent Sleep Of Reason (2016) is a politically themed work dealing with terrorism, religious extremism and violence, without ever expressing its ideas and concepts clearly or in depth. The tracks have generally grown longer, so that just ten of them come close to filling a full hour.

"Clockworks", over seven minutes long, is one of their quintessential brain-twisting polyrhythms, with a disjointed guitar solo at its center and Kidman straining his voice more and more, even if he's lost some of his old power: it's one of the most convincing tracks on their recent albums. The title track's tectonic funk-metal is also captivating, a scant seven minutes in which the Swedes run through a catalogue of atrocious sonic cruelties without giving the eardrums a moment's rest. "Into Decay" opens with an unusual doom-metal gait, favoring power over speed and complexity, and manages to become one of the most human tracks in a career built on mechanical, robotic structures.

The rest of the record sweeps far and wide through the style that made them famous: "Monstrocity" wedges in another pyrotechnic solo amid the devastation; "By The Ton" and "Stifled" focus on groove the way Nothing did; "Nostrum" brings to mind the intricate geometries of Caosphere.

After years of albums recorded by each member separately and then digitally assembled, Meshuggah opt for a "live in studio" approach on The Violent Sleep Of Reason, revealed by a few telling details, first and foremost the opener, where Haake sets the pace for the rest of the band. The result is a more human, less sterile album, one that steers them away from aging into technological, digital metal. Once again, there's no innovation capable of rivalling the upheavals of the past. The impression is that, on a roughly four-year cycle, Meshuggah return to reassert their importance within the extreme music scene, which in the meantime has copied — and, more rarely, reworked — their influential inventions.

On their ninth studio album, titled Immutable and released a full six years after The Violent Sleep Of Reason (2016), Meshuggah arrive buoyed by a fiercely loyal fanbase and a cross-generational, international recognition: it's widely held that the Swedes have profoundly transformed metal over the last two decades, with few equals in the genre. "Immutable" simply reaffirms the creativity of those original ideas and the band's technical depth: the rhythmic geometries, the harmonic ferocity, the compositional intensity are all still there.

Novelty, across the album's 66-minute runtime, isn't exactly the main focus. Pinned down at the center of the crossfire of guitars, vocals and the legendary rhythm section led by Tomas Haake right from the opening "Broken Cog" — actually introduced by a menacing whisper from Jens Kidman, one of the album's more atypical touches — listeners find themselves back in a familiar war zone. Immutable and unmovable, the Swedish metal madmen are in fact relentless in their predictability, returning after a good five years to sound much the same, with no upheavals whatsoever.