Meshuggah - obZen (2008)Release ID: 2605
It's not easy to describe how excellent Meshuggah is. The amount of love and success for Meshuggah is kinda obscure outside the metal community. Most people who prefer other music genres (preferably the softer ones) would think this heavy type of music is obscene. But I love djent enough that it ain't obscene for me! The only thing I would find a little obscene is this album's cover art; an androgynous figure meditating on a puddle of blood!! WT*
Anyway, Meshuggah had emerged once again with another album, obZen. Metalheads who either love or hate Meshuggah would expect them to have horrendously crushing downtuned riffs, awesome drumming, and other stuff to form a rising wall of sound. All of that can be found in obZen with a little interesting difference.
The album opener, "Combustion" causes the album to combust into an explosive start. Straight forward complexity, yet there aren't any poly-rhythms and the song is just all-out thrash. A killer callback to Contradictions Collapse and a very upbeat album opening! "Electric Red" contains excellent riffing, especially in that sweet passage at 1:10. "Bleed" is probably the best song by Meshuggah since Chaosphere. Thrashy and memorable! At 1:24 is a total headbanging passage.
"Lethargica" is more technical and slower, but it comes out as one of the album's heaviest tracks. The riffs during the fade-out are excellent. The bone-crushing breakdowns continue in the album's title track. The sheer intensity of the astonishing "This Spiteful Snake" is just possessed with power, compelling the listener to hear this relentless attack whether or not the listener's brain would get confounded.
"Pineal Gland Optics" continues to deliver speed and has some excellent riffs with higher intelligence, especially in the fade-out. The opening riff of "Pravus" is simple enough for the drummer to follow, but leads into the song so perfectly. What may be vocalist Jens Kidman's best vocal performance yet is on the album's closing track, "Dancers to a Discordant System", along with some of the last prominent vocals from drummer Tomas Haake. Both of those vocals gave me chills! That song has far more intelligent riffs than most of the other songs and really brings the album to a great discordant end.
Whether you love it or hate it, you just have to face it, Meshuggah is a total winner in the European metal scene. The chemistry built up by the band members is astonishing, as well as the constant quality that still turns out well through the moderate experimentation one album after another. ObZen has the usual business, and that's NOT at all a problem with Meshuggah because it's the sort of level of music no other band can achieve after one album. Sadly it doesn't match the standards of their previous albums. Perhaps a good album to start with when you first get interested in Meshuggah, encompassing all the band's essentials. Newcomers' minds shall be blown away....
Favorites: Combustion, Bleed, Lethargica, Pravus, Dancers to a Discordant System
I have mixed feelings about this album. On the positive side, the band rightly decided not to take the one-track epic with programmed drums any further as it had run it's course. Instead they decided to go back to their roots & returned with a sound that is basically a combination of all of their albums to date. On paper that sounds great. In practise it means that "ObZen" doesn't really offer anything that you haven't heard from them many times before. Because of this I find my attention waning at times during this album.
All of the usual Meshuggah highlights are here (including the crushing bass guitar) & I do find myself loving a lot of this record but I have a little bit of an issue with the production as there seems to be too much high-end which leaves the album sounding a bit noisy & less precise. There seems to be a wall of crash cymbal throughout pretty much the entire album & the guitars are not as full as on previous albums. There is also very little variety in the vocals & it might be time to introduce something different there. That pretty much sums up the album really. A couple of Meshuggah's previous albums have been carried by the complexity & technicality of the song structures & riffs. "ObZen" is probably a little less complex than their recent releases which should help them recreate this stuff live. But this also takes away from the element that carried my interest during more monotonous periods on albums like "Catch Thirty Three".
Overall, Meshuggah are still a fair distance above 99% of the metal scene (see "Bleed" which is as good a track as the band have ever recorded) & therefore I find it very difficult to give them a rating of less than 4 stars for such sublime metal music. However I think this will be the last time that I can justify giving a four-star rating to Meshuggah albums without them adding something new to their sound. Dazzle me guys!
