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The De...Marga... & Galensorg Productions is pleased to present you a new chapter...
7 October 2016: Today is the day!!!
Today is the day I've been waiting for months. The day of the Meshuggah's discographic return.
No one sounds like them: unique, formidable, and daunting. Thirty years of a career in which they have carefully assessed their works; this is indeed only the eighth full-length album. Four years after "Koloss", eight after "Obzen".
Rarely have I read one of their interviews, even in magazines and on websites dedicated to Metal. Reticent characters who don't like to show off. They speak with their music; a Cyber-Thrash-Metal that provokes uneasiness, that instills terror. Every new release of theirs has always been designed to hurt upon listening, to evoke physical and mental pain: heaviness, dizziness, repetition of sounds that delve into the subconscious.
In a very rare interview a few months ago, to present "The Violent Sleep Of Reason", drummer Tomas Haake said, "The new album was recorded live; we had never done it before. 'Koloss' and 'Obzen' are two successful works, but to me, they sound too perfect. Recording live you can hear the imperfections, albeit minimal. You can hear that one of us is ahead of the others. We wanted to recapture the raw energy of the '80s and '90s records that helped shape our sound." I don’t think any comments are needed, also because, knowing the entire musical career of the Swedes, I already have the key to interpreting the album.
In some way, Meshuggah are anchored, are indissolubly tied to their way of perceiving music. They will never be able to change, to try new paths, to open themselves to new sonic horizons. They are "forced" to develop new songs always leveraging Jens's vocal growl, Fredrik and Mårten's eight-string guitars. With those downtuned, atonal, cold, hallucinated riffs of immense power. And when you can count on Tomas's unmistakable drumming, schizophrenic and oblique, fragmented and offbeat, then the final result will be a deluge that floods you during the listening. Offering no footholds, leaving no survivors.
Now I can open the CD that I have purchased just a few minutes ago from my usual musical pusher; and I can thus smell that so familiar scent of the cardboard package. Then I’ll press the play button and be annihilated in the next fifty-eight minutes and fifty-five seconds.
Here we go, it starts "Clockworks"...MESHUGGAAARRRHHH...
...IN SPACE NO ONE CAN HEAR YOU UNLESS YOU SCREAM...
The mechanisms of the beastly crawler click into action. A creature that doesn't need to travel at high speeds because its firepower is unmatched.
Once again, the Swedes from Umeå present us with a very solid work, where the experience accumulated in these long years of music has its titanic weight and ensures the sound is practically perfect, very similar to the standards of the latest albums, to the point that it doesn't seem raw at all. There are no particular surprises, in all honesty, from this point of view.
The surprising thing, however, is the quality and the freshness persistently detectable in products branded Meshuggah, although the tune is the same in every album.
As already anticipated previously, the riffs are heavier and darker than ever and they communicate it directly by hurling them onto your shoulders during the listening: tracks like "By The Ton" and "Violent Sleep Of Reason" precisely have the ability to leave you without strength as the minutes pass by and there's no Cyrenian to give you help during this personal ordeal (and luckily, because I enjoy Meshuggah alone!).
If you then stumble into "MonstroCity" and "Stifled", semi-paralysis and epileptic fits arise spontaneously, with displays of terrifying technique in the pursued sound chaos, and it's precisely here that Thordendal and Hagström pull out the best solos from their quiver. Going out on a limb more than necessary, "MonstroCity" could already rightfully find itself in the top 5 of the solos in their repertoire.
In the end, the single "Born In Dissonance" served only as an appetizer for what would be a dish rich in cold, sharp blades, because that's what these tracks would be if we could only touch them.
The sleep of reason produces monsters.
De...Marga... & Galensorg
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