 
The beauty of this music is the constant discovery of listening to
it. The convoluted soundscape of polyrhythmia is like a rubix cube.
But all the squares are black. And have wrought iron spikes sticking
out of them. Meshuggah’s recording career has 3 distinct periods.
The first period is the “day job” period. (None & Contradictions
Collapse). The riffs seemed to attempt to take the progressiveness of
…And justice for All-era Metallica to the next level but compositionally
didn’t gel enough. In 1998 it all came together with the breakthrough
Destroy Erase Improve that not only presented the maturity of the band
but has also become a benchmark in heavy metal music as a whole. The
1999 follow up Chaosphere followed in the style of DEI to such a degree
that it sounds like overflow from those sessions but with material of
equal quality. The third period I like to call the “7 strings
are not enough” phase. There was a distinct change in Meshuggah’s
sound that began with the record Nothing which is characterized by the
use of the custom made 8 string Nevborn guitar (which goes a minor 7th
lower than a standard guitar and has a custom wound pickup that allows
for superb clarity and tons of overtones). More than the extra string
on the record, was a change in the sonic aspects of the band. They relied
more heavily on recording direct via the Line 6 Pod amp simulators.
This added a 21st century digital sparkle to their sound and probably
aided in the clarity of low frequencies that may never have happened
with traditional speakers and microphones. There is also more attention
to the slower groove on that record. The phraseology and sonic qualities
of Nothing were extended into an epic for 2004’s I ep on Fractured
Transmitter records. Catch 33 has taken the next step into the realm
of concept albums. The short 2 and 3 minute songs are interwoven by
ideas which begin as countermelodies to the first song and morph into
the motive of the next song. Toward the middle the track “In Death
– Is Death” serves as a large center piece of the record.
There are several themes that resurface throughout the record. The entire
album boils down to one all important “moral to the story”
which is at the root of all Meshuggah records. The whole cheery subject
of “post-apocalyptic cybernetic dehumanization bringing on an
internal struggle that is ultimately a contradiction”. You heard
it once, you heard it a thousand times. But who can understand the lyrics
anyway. Loud, excessive, complex, you know, a real finger popper. –
Jeffrey Kalmbach
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Meshuggah