Nuclear Blast (2008)

Author’s note: I swear on my slave-owning ancestors’ cross-cut gravestones that I’m not wholeheartedly racist, but I’ll adamantly admit that this review sure as Hell is, in memoriam our fallen Confederate comrade, Deadbag Darrell, and his surviving colonel, Phil [Your Mouth] Anselmo.

Within the canon of European classical music—into which the country of Sweden has uploaded no militia-caliber, orchestral (much less chamber) firepower—there exists a form of composition called the etude: a piece of music designed to sharpen specific instrumental mechanics, such as a pianist’s cross-armed playing or a flutist’s breath control.

Meshuggah’s excruciatingly exact time-management exercises could, in one sense, be described as modern-day etudes, existing for no outwardly discernible purpose, apart from its inwardly autistic members’ need to—like the perfectly parted, leftist pinko commie pond scum they politely take turns wakeboarding through in die Sommer—collectively engineer a career out of manufacturing circular outlets with marginally different plug shapes so that their puzzled immigrant parents could feel empowered by their mulatto sons’ top-notch click-counting skills and inventive (by metal’s barbaric standards) meter subdivisions.

<Varg> How many decimal-ly different, severely downtuned syncopations can five Swedish men fit on top of the same mid-tempo, X/four cymbal hit during one exasperating, fifty-two-minute-and-thirty-four-second meditation-/murder-session?

Let’s find out. </Varg>

Even Encyclopedia Brown’s stankass should be able to see that Meshuggah, despite what their polyestered polymeter maids and fanmen bangbois might dupe you into believing, make JUMPDAFUCKUP groove metal for people with a superiority complex who’re too ashamed/afraid to openly admit that they’re truly turned on by this type of naked cavemen groove metal band, who’ll bend their hairless white knees for no man but that cheek-slapping house niger Rhythm.

What most amazes me about this obvious minstrel act, is not Meshuggah’s obsessive submission to rhythmic sadomasochism, but (Dan) rather, that they—throughout 25 basically-straight years of sporadic record-making—have managed to hoodwink thousands of headbanging buttocks into soldout concert seats, plus push out over a million physical/digital copies, all while employing one of the shittiest vocalist in the history of big-money, big-prizes metal.

Surely some of these feces-eating Niger-lovers, once interrogated, would nod in agreement that their Nasalcrom-allergic, sore throat of a vocalist—whose monotone screams showcase less range than a sawed-off shotgun, and emit as much aural force as an unmiced circus kazoo—openly sucks, but how many of Jens Kidman’s detractors would also be willing to unleash their PePaw’s rabid, flea-ridden hounds, and sic ’em on those runaway Swedes’ stumbling songwriting?

I would—with a single toot of my unhearable pounce signal—seize any opportunity to send my (great, great grandpappy’s) plantation’s shortest—but fastest—animals after Fredrik & Friends, to (re)enact a second Coppola-directed, Tommy gun-esque massacre, because you see, sonny boy, those poor man’s Allan Holdsworth solos + sorry I’m not capable of feeling sorry excuse for riffs sound like dueling stepbrothers’ bass & guitar string slinkies, drag racing down some redundant corporation’s shuttered, dilapidated foresting factory’s decades-since-abandoned, partially rotted, heavily splintered staircases, in arrangements that resemble a laid-off pension-collector’s basement barber shop for they/them/their multicultural, transcontinental, mail-order blowup doll brides, each extravagantly dressed, carefully made up, and proportionately lined up against zie/zim/zir unpainted cinderblock walls, without any musical rhyme or reason, and either a complete ignorance or a purposeful ignoring of basic compositional concepts like introduction, build, climax, transition, restatement, and so on, and so forth.

Meshuggah’s shitty songs amount to little more than a procedurally generated Unity asset flip of groove metal, feeling like the band members gathered around an IKEA standing workstation, dumped 100+ similar sounding grooves into one big audio file casserole, then had a homemade computer program dice roll its way through–and thus circumvent–the necessary manual labor of chopping apart their riff salads into swallowable, easily digestible bites.

The overwhelming bulk of Meshuggah’s squatting, clenching and nothing but air comes out compositions engender that feeling of occupying one’s mindspace for much longer than should be medically accepted, wearing out your ear holes with their repeated, dry, constipated playing style that’s guaranteed to leave an undoucheable rash behind, which will gradually spread across each of your picking hand’s finger flaps over the course of the next few workweeks (regardless of which full-length, spinny circle hole you plop into your home office’s rotating multi-disc unit), and will have your lower third’s trembling parts sweating like you’ve gone eight minutes deep, when inside you know without looking that your MeMaw’s hand-me-down wall-clock’s big dipper still hasn’t moved past two.

Basically, what I’m saying is that Meshuggah are a Meanwhile in Finland meme of Pantera, minus the high-key racism;

Meshuggah are MuDvAyNe with a couple of community college credits and an unfinished undergraduate degree in applied mathematics;

Meshuggah are the musical equivalent of a weedeater cutting staccato patterns around a gastronomically curvy, single-digit-speed-limit golf cart path, while some sombrero-protected, stereotypically foreign, caddy bag of a person pretends to work by repeatedly raking over a single rattlesnake-cleared sand trap, whilst his inebriated brother-in-law takes his sweet time straddling that too-nice-for-him-to-own John Deere lawnmower all across the can’t-possibly-be-parred back nine in semi-crooked, cocaine-like lines that, by sundown, will surely have been irreversibly burned into The Golden Bear’s neatly divided, three-hundred-yard stretches of doglegged fairways.

Like white noise, the less you actively listen to Meshuggah, and the more you subversively move these brutes’ muscular lid banging and skin smashing into your cerebral background—alongside your dorm room’s solo, unshaded light bulb and rust-plated air conditioner grates—the better their waifu-beating music becomes.

But man—like all of his best non-improvised scores—cannot survive on chugs alone. Maybe bros can, but (I ain’t never scared!) I ain’t never been no bro, Bro.

And honestly, if you goobers want to turn your guitars into butt puppets and make all your licks sound like an electric fart box, I’m cool with that as a musical concept, but your songs—especially if you’re going to stretch them out into the I-better-grab-a-blackpack, 5-to-8-minute length—still need to have a sense of drama and a mission of melodic development. Rhythm is meant to be but one part of good music, not the only part of the band that’s capable of lighting up the listener’s battery-powered brain cells.

Let’s not forget that, even Transilvanian Fucking Hunger, which I would argue, is the most masterful use of minimalism in metal music, maintains a steady feeling of forward momentum in all of its songs’ brisk walks along Fenriz’ frozen fingerboard, plus each of its tracks contains key changes that surprise in an orgasmic way, like a hiker stumbling upon a half-buried, brown-paper-bagged porn stash, and not in a dysfunctional way, like Meshuggah’s bottomless bowls of Poop Loops cereal scoops, which promise but never deliver to its hopeful purchasers a suitable prize somewhere inside its monochrome cardboard package and airtight grain & oats graveyard.

Grade: D+