Photo courtesy Meshuggah’s MySpace

Meshuggah w/ Ministry
Tuesday April 15
La Zona Rosa (612 W. 4th Street)
Doors at 8 PM, Gen.: $43.50 / VIP: $105
[info] | [tickets]

Debuting as a post-Metallica thrash outfit with 1991’s Contradictions Collapse, Sweden’s Meshuggah have been refining their intractable sound to a serene balance of pummeling death metal and intricate technical sophistication. Fittingly, their latest record is called obZen, and for much of its hour-plus running time, the album does in fact bring a sense of zen-like calm to its brutally complex compositions.

Since 1995’s Destroy Erase Improve, Meshuggah have essentially tilled the same ground—tightly wound rhythms and polymeters (the drums and guitars playing in different, interlocking time signatures), labyrinthine song structures, and Jens Kidman’s apocalyptic rasp, underpinned by drummer Tomas Haake’s superhuman rhythmic abilities. But the resulting albums have been radically different: whereas 1998’s Chaosphere was a dense slab of progressive metal, the work of a hungry young band eager to shake the rafters, 2002’s Nothing took a more experimental route, focusing on texture and mood over sheer brutality. But 2005’s Catch Thirty-Three, a full-length album designed as a single 47-minute song, took the band's technical experimentation to the limits of listenability, experimenting (lamentably) with vocoders and other studio frills and hiding a batch of weak songs behind the record’s conceptual framework.

Thankfully, obZen, their sixth and latest full-length manages to encapsulate the diversity of their last five LPs into its nine tracks. The first lyrics on the record—“No more ifs / no bias / no ambiguity”—subtly point up the band's newfound sense of purpose: track one, “Combustion,” represents the purest form of Meshuggah’s brand of controlled chaos ever recorded, and yet it’s the most straightforward tune they’ve done since the early '90s, a welcome breath of fresh air from a band that has recently stretched the limits of compositional knottiness. The song opens with a single guitar, playing a characteristically spindly line; but where most Meshuggah riffs tend to lumber, this one dances. Within seconds the song takes off at a blindingly fast tempo, the guitar figures winding around a galloping drumbeat that sounds as if it's going in two directions at once. Things get seriously hairy on track three, “Bleed,” which is driven by a triple-time kick drum pattern so precise it seems to have been concocted using the ToonTrack drum module program Tomas Haake used on Catch Thirty-Three (and had a hand in designing). In fact, the entire drum part was recorded live by Haake, with no overdubs.

Even with such mind-numbing technical skill on display, old-school fans should be relieved that Meshuggah have finally managed to put aside their quest for ever-more-difficult time signatures and simply write memorable songs. obZen entered Billboard’s top 100 the week of its US release, proving that the band’s labors in the studio and on the road have forged a considerable fan base for their singular brand of progressive death metal. (It helps that the band isn't entirely humorless--check out their sublimely silly video for "New Millenium Cyanide Christ," embedded below.) They’re currently opening for Ministry on their final tour, which will be rolling into La Rosa Rosa tonight. This is a band that averages an album every three years, so if you plan on seeing Meshuggah live this decade--or Ministry, ever again--do yourself a favor and call in sick tomorrow.

Meshuggah MySpace
ToonTrack online
La Zona Rosa online