Jolt Country

2007, I asked Vitriola about bands I might like if I liked Dillinger Escape Plan, with its extreme musicianship and wildly offensive disregard for time signatures and musical decency. She said:

Vitriola wrote:Mathcore? (I think you misspelled technical death).

Incision
Death
Meshuggah (sp?)

There's one more I like who I can't remember the name of. I like Incision the best, Death is the band that started the whole thing, and, every frikken December or whenever it was, someone posts a message about the creative guy's (Chuck Schuldinger's) death from cancer 5 or so years ago. I am not making fun, I actually have an older album (Scream Bloody Gore) (Which Robb bought me without ever having listened to it or having heard it since) where they were more thrashy than technical death, but they practically invented technical (math) metal genre, and are revered. But not maybe as deathy as you would like.

I ignored or missed the bolded line above, and lost six more years of my musical life.

I started this topic on Facebook, but I hate Facebook so I'm moving it here.

A couple times in my life I've heard a song from a band I didn't know about that made me drop everything, say holy shit, say this can't really exist, can't really be this good, and then I go and buy all the albums. Zeppelin. Tool. Rage.

And now again, with this stupid goddamn band which has been around for like twenty years, and I just never knew. I didn't know.

It's all I've listened to since I discovered them. It feels like they created the band specifically for me. Every single goddamn track is a monstrous eye-opener, a peek into a raucous cauldron of musical brilliance I never knew existed. Plus I'm ready to beat down bitches if they step to me at any moment.

It's all the most audacious parts of Rush, Tool, Dillinger, Danza, boiled down to the essence, everything shifted a half a tone and an eighth of a beat in the wrong direction, and then the intense-o-meter dragged up to 12.

Many bands have songs with good parts. All of these songs are a non-stop continuous string of unbelievably good parts laid back to back.

God dammit. Instantly fills out my top ten bands ever.

I didn't know.



I didn't know.

My grandma lives in a far outlying suburb of Chicago. The suburb is relatively small and safe and as kids whenever we visited we were allowed to wander the entire town. Even though it was a small suburb, it still had a big city flair that the town I lived in (Yukon, Oklahoma) was missing. Within just a few blocks of my grandma's house was a public skate park, an unrelated skate shop, a sushi bar, roughly seventeen pizza parlors, and a small, independent record store. As a teen I spent a lot of time visiting those places, especially the record store and drooling over all the CDs and records of bands that I couldn't find back home in Oklahoma.

I can't remember why I was there -- a wedding, I think -- but in the fall of '99 I was visiting Chicago and found myself back in that same record store. I had been getting into some pretty heavy music by then and had actually walked down to the record store to look for something from Gorefest. I found what I was looking for and when I went to check out the guy behind the counter said, "Hey, if you like Gorefest, you'll love Meshuggah." I have since learned that pretty much every time someone at a record store recommends me an album it's just to boost their sales, but whatever. I had heard of Meshuggah (I think they were opening for Slayer maybe around that time?) and so I ended up leaving with one Gorefest CD and two Meshuggah CDs.

My car had a six-disc CD changer at that time and those CDs along with Fear Factory's Demanufacture and Alice in Chains' Dirt stayed in there permanently, with only the sixth slot changing occasionally.

Meshuggah changes enough from album to album that it's sometimes tough to like "Meshuggah" and easier to like specific albums. I had a tough time getting into 33, but Nothing is pretty good and obZen... oh, obZen. I wish I had more time to devote to listening to Pitch Black. I haven't spent enough time with it to get into yet.

Anyway, that's my Meshuggah story. Glad you finally discovered them. There are a lot of layers in the Meshuggah onion to peel back.

See, I started with the new one, Koloss, and I thought it was the best album of all time.

Then I got obZen and thought, this is the best album of all time.

Working backwards, I then got Catch-33, which is the best album of all time.

Then I went "old school" and picked up Chaosphere. I'm only a ways into it, but so far it's the best album of all time.

They play only the exact notes that I want to hear at any particular time. I appreciate that.

I hope Koloss is not the last album. How dumb would I feel if I finally got into a band that's been around for ages, and then they quit and I never got to see 'em?

(Pretty dumb!)

They just swung through the southwest last month! God dammit.


I DIDN'T KNOW.

Hop in one of those balloons and catch them!

Flack wrote:I wish I had more time to devote to listening to Pitch Black. I haven't spent enough time with it to get into yet.

Well, it's just, like, two tracks, right? An unreleased track from 2003, and a live version of an ObZen song! Right?

I am listening to the unreleased track now! It has a four-note riff repeated ten thousand times at various volumes! Who wouldn't like that?

I am listening to "Nothing" now.

It is the best album of all time.

What's next? You're gonna tell us that you're also unaware of Lamb of God?

But, well. Can happen. I didn't know Tool existed, remember? ;-)

I dunno yo, that's the thing. For me there's this incredibly fine line with this sort of "heavy" music, where on one side for me it's amazing and the greatest thing ever, and, just inches away, on the other side it's tiresome, grating, and boring.

I guess I'd sum it up thusly: If you're going to do away completely with melody, something equally involving has to take its place. With Meshuggah (and mostly with Dillinger Escape Plan, although Greg still likes to sing "notes" occasionally, that crazy kid), melody's place is taken completely and marvelously by rhythmic insanity and "how can anyone play instruments like that" technicality. I'm a rhythmic guy, and a musician, so these appeal to me.

If you're just gonna get rid of melody and replace it with chugging 16th notes in 4/4, blast beats and growling about corpses and shit, just doesn't work for me.

Thanks for taking my call.

I mean, check this out. Lamb of God sounds like Meshuggah's retarded cousin:

[youtube][/youtube]

To sum up, I guess I can't put it better than one of the commentors:

MrRiiikard wrote: Meshuggah ffs!
More brutal, which the booth band will!
An Meshuggah is the band which succeed best!

Can't argue with that, my man. Can't argue with that.

Well, Justin Bieber runs circles around both of them, so that can't really be an argument. I like both of course, though with a slight preference towards LoG. Might be because they sounded somewhat similar to Machine Head, which is the band that introduced me to this kind of metal. (Before that, I was pretty much living in a universe that only consisted of Metallica, Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath and AC/DC.)

Edit:
Though I must say I definitely can pick up melody lines in LoG. I don't think they gave that up. But then again, I hear melodies in Slayer too, so maybe it's just me or you need a trained ear :P (Yeah, it's not Jazz though.)

Yes, LoG sounds closer to actual music.

I don't care for that.

Just watched "Alive", the Meshuggah DVD recorded during the ObZen tour.

The best DVD I have ever watched.

From now on, I will only enjoy Meshuggah-approved notes.

Also Catch-33 is my favorite, mainly because I think it makes me cool to say Catch-33 is my favorite.

I just got "I", the 21-minute single-track EP from 2004. Amazon doesn't even sell it, but Google somehow has it for 99 cents, since it's just one "track".

It is the best 99 cent 21-minute track of all time.

Speaking of which, I think I've found the perfect litmus test to find out if you may be a Meshuggah fan!

Turn on the aforementioned "I" and listen to the first 90 seconds!

If you didn't turn it off in some mixture of boredom or disgust before the full 90 seconds had elapsed... you may be a Meshuggah fan!

[youtube][/youtube]

And the thing is, and I'll stop talking about this eventually, 19% of the threads I've found on the internet now are about "I like Meshuggah, what bands sound like them", and without exception so far, anything mentioned afterwards is terrible.

Is this really a band that carved out their own thing that absolutely nobody has been able to successfully copy/improve upon?

The closest I've found is "Animals as Leaders", which has no vocals, a lot more melodic/virtuoso guitar playing, but a few of the same down-tuned, bended riffs that you could mistake for a Meshuggah song if you tried hard.

What the hell is going on here?

pinback wrote:Speaking of which, I think I've found the perfect litmus test to find out if you may be a Meshuggah fan!

Turn on the aforementioned "I" and listen to the first 90 seconds!

If you didn't turn it off in some mixture of boredom or disgust before the full 90 seconds had elapsed... you may be a Meshuggah fan!

I listened and was considering turning it off after 12 seconds, but I was fair and gave it the full 1:30 until blood started spurting from my ears, and you know what, again, it's another 90 seconds of my life I'll never get back!

Basically 90 seconds of someone running a jackhammer. The first 12 were representative of the other 68, it's all the same. If you're wondering about the other 10 seconds, well, I forgot, it's made me that much stupider from listening to it.

Death metal music minus the music or the metal, just pure death. Use of this in place of capital punishment will probably cause "the State Supreme Court later ruled listening to this music, even in place of lethal injection for prisoners sentenced to be executed, violated the 8th amendment's protection against cruel and unusual punishment, and suggested death by stoning or torture would be more humane. The same case would also declare it was also unconstitutional as "excessively harsh, reprehensibly cruel and inhumanely barbaric" to send prisoners such as convicted rapists and child molesters to that YouTube video, even if they didn't have to listen."

Back when I was writing for WTD I know I received a few CDs in the mail that were "Meshuggah-like" ... maybe I can dig some of them out when I get back home in a couple of weeks. Unfortunately due to the nature of the music business, there aren't a lot of signed bands that sound like Meshuggah because quite frankly there's no money in it.

Have you checked out Four Question Marks yet?

Check Wikipedia for "djent" for a list of a few bands in the genre. Four Question Marks are not listed on there but Animals as Leaders are.

I have not checked out four question marks, but have checked out many of the bands listed under the "djent" genre. More fun is to be had listening to people argue about whether that's an actual genre or not than listening to the music.

Most will disagree, but for me Meshuggah and Nevermore sound similar. Totally different vocals (I *mean* it; Darrell Wane's vocals are unique compared to *everything*), but the feeling I get from the instrumental work is extremely similar. And Nevermore happens to be one of the best bands in the world, of course ;-)

A single song:



A complete album: