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Friday Full-Length: Meshuggah, Chaosphere

Posted in Bootleg Theater on November 6th, 2020 by JJ Koczan

Immediately before I started writing this sentence — just now — I clicked through the back end of this site to filter out a couple spam comments. They always throw something random in the text, then link to I don’t even know what because there’s no way I’m clicking to find out. Sometimes it’s like “ur sitez teh best omg how you blog” or whatever. This morning all it said was “where to find neurosurgeon.” I can hardly think of a more appropriate question to lead into a discussion about Meshuggah‘s Chaosphere.

Based in Umeå, Sweden, and dating back to the thrashy beginnings of the late 1980s, they’re a long-standing flagship band of Nuclear Blast Records and unquestionably among the most influential bands of their generation. Their 1991 debut, Contradictions Collapse — which wound up repackaged with the 1994 EP None — led to 1995’s landmark Destroy, Erase, Improve, which in songs like “Soul Burn,” “Suffer in Truth” and “Future Breed Machine” became the skull from which what was later known as “djent” sprang. Not the best descriptor, but a more efficient encapsulation than astoundingly-progressive-and-technically-focused-time-signature-fuckery And yeah, “djent” has been maligned since like every trend that arises in heavy metal eventually is, but that wouldn’t be the case if band’s weren’t doing it. And they were and are.

Chaosphere, which followed the 1997 EP The True Human Design and coincided with the also-’97 release of Sol Niger Within, a debut album from guitarist Fredrik Thordendal‘s side-project, Fredrik Thordendal’s Special Defects, is inarguably pinnacle Meshuggah. Its largely, willfully amelodic refinement of the crunch, crush and inhuman style that emerged on the prior record makes its 47-minute run breathtakingly intense even more than two decades later. The subtleties of spacious guitar leads and mechanized — industrial, really, without the keyboards — rhythms between Thordendal and Mårten Hagström, the punch of bass at the outset of “Neurotica” from Gustaf Hielm, the lifeline of Tomas Haake‘s okay-now-make-it-all-make-sense drums thrown to the listener as though if we just all find the snare pattern it’ll be fine, along with the largely unipolar bark of vocalist Jens Kidman, all work together to bring metal to a place it had never gone on songs like “Concatenation” and “Corridor of Chameleons,” while still somehow staying catchy on “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” and “The Mouth Licking What You’ve Bled.”

It was an album that demanded nothing less than memorization. It tasked the listener in a way that ran counter to the bulk of what was being produced through even bigger underground labels at that point, whether it was the nü-metal and rap-crossover dominating radio and MTV or the death or black metal and stoner rock that began to take shape elsewhere. At the dawn of the age of file-sharing, Meshuggah were a band speaking from a post-apocalyptic future, Meshuggah Chaosphereand even at low volumes their work astounded, but loud, it was like being churned through gears in an old Looney Tunes cartoon, winding your way seemingly at random through the inner workings, springs and chunking pieces of metal of a clock keeping its own time. If you could get your head around it at all, it felt like an win. The sheer severity.

And yet somehow, Chaosphere also seems spare. Neither “The Mouth Licking What You’ve Bled” nor “Sane” and “The Exquisite Machinery of Torture” top four minutes — though they’re all close — and the only reason the runtime hits 47 minutes is because after closer “Elastic” finishes at around six minutes in, there’s five-plus minutes of noise and then the band piles four songs on top of each other for a final four minutes of absolute noise punishment, making the ‘track’ a total of 15 minutes long. But even if you can listen to that unnerving drone — and really, you can, but only if you really feel the need to prove that to yourself — and the appropriate ball of chaos that follows, which is interesting if completely overwhelming, it’s the forcefulness of purpose in the earlier proceedings that so much stands out.

I won’t get into debating Chaosphere versus others in Meshuggah‘s discography either before or after. Destroy, Erase, Improve was a step along the path and crucial in its own right, but its follow-up stands alone among the band’s output, and even aside from the fact that it inspired an entire generation — probably two at this point — to explore more complexity in their own songwriting for better and/or worse as well as a ton of lunkhead mosh parts, its own victory still stands up 22 years later in the cathartic listening experience. From the raging shove of “Concatenation” through the start-stop breakdown late in “New Millennium Cyanide Christ” and the violence that seems to accompany every fitful smash of “Corridor of Chameleons,” it is a masterpiece of its own particular kind of brutality, and the stuff of which legacies — specifically Meshuggah‘s — are rightly made.

They made the most of it, sort of, by touring. A compilation, Rare Trax, would be their next release in 2001, though, and I recall that feeling like a long time. When the band did emerge with new output, it was the 2002 LP Nothing, which would get a subsequent redux in 2006, and the 2004 I EP, a single-song 20-minute track that stands as one of Meshuggah‘s greatest achievements. Along with the 2005 LP Catch Thirty-Three and 2008’s obZen, this stands as the most productive period in the band’s history, with the album Koloss following in 2012 and offering up a few singles but little new to the mix. By contrast, 2016’s The Violent Sleep of Reason found the group recording live and trying to capture a more natural feel counter to popular conception of what they do, and while raw-sounding at times, it was clear their restlessness was leading them to try something else.

Now statesmen of metal some eight or nine records deep into a tenure of 30-plus years, that they’d even bother speaks to the enduring creative and progressive spirit that led to the accomplishment that was and is Chaosphere. It continues to stun and likely will do so into perpetuity.

In the parlance of our times, “current mood:” and “MFW.”

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

6:01AM. I tried to go for a run after finishing the above. Got running clothes on, my new brown Carhartt hat that’s like the one I had in high school — I guess between that and the Meshuggah I’m regressing; maybe I’ll replay Final Fantasy VIII next — and barely made it out of the driveway before my left heel offered a swift correction. Feels like plantar fasciitis, which is familiar enough, but I’ve been having trouble with that ankle of late as well. This is a familiar pattern. I start to work out, hurt myself, stop, “compensate” through negative eating habits, feel like shit, feel like shit, and in the end, feel like shit.

I also haven’t had any form of nut butter in like a month now, because, really, it was getting out of hand, and I don’t know if I’ve lost any weight as a result, but I’ve definitely lost some of my sense of joy in life. So that’s good. Because enjoying things is bad.

I guess that feeling like shit part going to happen one way or the other, then. Maybe I really should break out the PlayStation. Would be something to give now-three-year-old The Pecan his first real 100 hours of screen time watching me get Squall and company up to level 85 and then just wreck everybody. My time-tested method for such things.

Ah.

The Meshuggah choice, if it needs to be said, was born of frustration with the uncertainty of the American political situation, the presidential election, various dictatorial rantings on the part of the White House — which really should be torn down and replaced by something not built by slaves, just for the optics if not the actual morality of it — and so on. How many times can you refresh the New York Times frontpage in a single day? I’m on a quest to find out. Fuck the electoral college, the senate and other such bastions of American anti-democracy. Chaosphere has been a welcome cathartic burst even if the unspoken companion message there is my own impotency to enact any sort of change to any of it. At least music still sounds good.

Not that Joe Biden is going to fix everything, you understand. Like because he was Obama’s VP structural racism will end and cops will stop killing black people and economic inequality will disappear and we’ll all have healthcare and student loan forgiveness and blah blah blah godless socialist paradise that everyone actually wants but doesn’t happen because CAPITALISM. He’s a mediocre candidate and that was the point behind his getting the nomination — the Democratic party wanted a safe choice to counteract the president’s off-rails consumption of the media sphere, otherwise they wouldn’t have undercut Bernie Sanders as brutally as they did — but how much worse can he possibly make anything? Two days in a row of 100,000-plus new cases of COVID-19, and a dude standing in front of a mic in the press briefing room just lying about shit. Biden’s mediocre but at least he’s human. The president is like Nomad after Kirk tells him he’s not the crea-tor, all spouting nonsense with smoke coming out of his ears and so on.

Well, the kid’s up and looking out his window. He’s been up earlier all week with the time change, though we’re starting to get back on track. He’s also been biting again, and hitting, and kicking. Comes and goes. He bites himself. He bites me. He grabs now, kind of a proto-pinch. Frustrating. Shitty. After a year of occupational therapy, kind of backslid going into preschool. I’m hoping it’s the change in schedule/physical activity. I’m hoping it doesn’t last. I’m hoping he doesn’t bite another kid, though last time he did the kid scratched his face all to hell and I kind of thought that was a win on a lesson-learned level. Apparently not, though it’s not like I’m going to bite him back, as much as I’ve been given that advice in the past.

Everything’s a fight though. The good news is the dog hasn’t really been around to make it worse. She’s been spending days up the road at my sister and mother’s house, where there’s a big fenced-in back yard to run around, other dogs to play with, and a toddler factor of zero. Frankly, it seems like a better existence for her there on every level, and the photos of the dog relaxed and sprawled on their couch snuggling their other dogs that my sister has been sending me all week bear that out. Apparently one of their dogs, Rey, whines now when Omi leaves. Omi was also despondent last time I picked her up. We’ll see how that plays out over time, but I’m not at all opposed to sharing the dog in the interim. My sister’s son, 10, apparently likes her as well. So yeah.

We’re thinking of going to Connecticut today to see The Patient Mrs.’ mother before her place at the beach closes for the season so the pipes don’t freeze. It’s always kind of stressful with The Pecan, since there’s no real “proofing” that small space for him, but we might just suck it up and go. We’re up that way tomorrow anyhow for great-grandma’s 90-somethingth birthday. Outside. Maybe masks? I don’t know. We’re all in the pod anyway.

I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Next week is packed. Today is Bandcamp Friday. No Gimme show, but I’ll be kicking around a few recommendations on Facebook for how to spend your money, if you feel like keeping an eye out. If you don’t, I get that too. Times are tough. My Facebook likes thing is broken (you have to click to the post from the frontpage, then look at the bottom one to see how many likes there are; I have no idea why and I can’t seem to fix it). So it goes. Make sure to hydrate.

FRM.

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