Meshuggah

Destroy Erase Improve (Nuclear Blast, 1995) was something completely different, although the natural evolution of the debut album's intuitions: devastating but in a brainy way, self-collapsing, an exploding/imploding yin/yang kind of architecture. The compositions were pretexts for drenching a Canterbury-style guitar-bass interplay into a boiling pit of pummeling drums. Future Breed Machine matches emphatic (and not so horrific) growling with stammering rhythm and then overlays a series of guitar inventions including an atmospheric interlude. The martial Soul Burn is hijacked by a sort of cubistic funky guitar and choral bursts of anger. For every straight-forward rigmarole like Beneath there is a disjointed and agonizing number like Vanished. The ferocious and imploding Terminal Illusions, the chaotically erupting lava of Suffer In Truth and the final howl and neurotic confusion of Sublevels seal a work of unremitting innovation. It was a brutal landscape that borrowed from jazz and post-rock.

The "songs" got even more angular and intricate (as well as longer) on Chaosphere (1998), thanks to the band indulging in off-kilter time signatures and polyrhythmic aggression. Marten Hagstrom's and Frederik Thorendal's atonal bacchanal erects walls around Concatenation, leaving almost no room for melodic development. That stuttering noise is the true rhythmic foundation of New Millennium Cyanide Christ (the album's standout), that otherwise would rely on the childish beat of the drums (the insistent repetition of simple ugly patterns is even reminiscent of early Sonic Youth). The blistering solo of Corridor Of Chameleons cuts through the rough turgid surface created by the rhythm section. Jens Kidman's vocals have never been so irrelevant as in these three opening pieces. They return to prominence in Neurotica, the most straightforward song, although the guitar solo in the middle steals the show with its smothered meowing. The deranged sonic assault resumes with The Mouth Licking What You've Bled, a relentless polyrhythmic locomotive, and Sane, a chaotic and eclectic accumulation of guitar techniques. After the rap-tinged divertissment of The Exquistit Machinery Of Torture, the album comes to a close with the 15-minute funk-metal juggernaut Elastic, first dilated into a seven-minute droning section and then "remixed" into a dense cacophonous five-minute coda.

However, the band soon retreated from those excesses. The jagged, unstable structures of Nothing (2002) evoke Saccharine Trust and Minutemen injected with the agony of the post-death generation. They have been drained of all the fury, so as to leave the guitar pyrotechnics as the sole protagonist. While intriguing and imposing, the work loses too much of its predecessor sheer emotional force.

Raretrax (Nuclear Blast) collects rarities.

Their masterpiece probably came with the EP I (2004), a seamless 21-minute orgy of post-metal ideas, with lots of loops, guitar drones, polyrhythmic progressions and abstract interludes. Without surrendering the frenzy of death-metal, I extended its outreach.

Contrasting with the monolithic EP that preceded it, Catch Thirty Three (Nuclear Blast, 2005) is an experimental suite broken down in brief movements that focus also on tape loops and beat machines and not only on guitar riffs and vocal growls. The hypnotic The Paradoxical Spiral is the only piece that escapes the funk-punk influence in the first half of the album. The problem is that all the brief fragments that segue into each other tend to sound repetitive, each one sounding like a remix of the previous one. (The first three and the second three compose two distinctive units). Technically speaking, Meshuggah's decade-long post-modern exorcism reaches its zenith with the 13-minute In Death Is Death, that is, ultimately, a sequence of sound effects (the last six minutes without any accompaniment). Shed is the "regular" song of the batch, but certainly not even close to the ferocity of Chaosphere. The seven-minute Sum is even more abstract, with delicate guitar tones floating around aimlessly. The playing on this album is not so much surgical as robotic. The contrast between the brutal group parts and the tenuous guitar soliloquies is not bridged adequately.

Obzen (2008) is so predictable that very few songs dare leave the typical path, and only Bleed stands up to past standards.

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