The Apparatus

 Thursday, 31 January 2008 'Chaosphere' was the first Meshuggah album I ever acquired, and as it stands, it's the one I have the most mixed feelings about. Coming off the heels of the magnificent 'Destroy Erase Improve', the music on the following album dropped a great deal of its original post-thrash roots in favor of pure industrial/technical brutality, consequently resulting in a great deal less variation and a great deal more focus. This is the favorite album of many dedicated Meshuggah fans for precisely this reason: it earmarks the absolute cementing of the band's style, and when you think of the music that Meshuggah does, a song like 'The Mouth Licking What You've Bled' is probably what pops into your mind: refined technical aggression with ultra-low chugging riffs, atonal tapping leads, brutally ejaculated vocals, and an overall sense of attacking the listener from as many angles as possible, all wrapped up in a bow of bizarre time signatures and bombastic delivery and production. It is, however, a somewhat bittersweet change: there's roughly no chance of Meshuggah ever going back to the style on 'Contradictions Collapse', and, at least to me, that's somewhat regrettable.

In truth, though, I probably owe more to this album than any other in the world. My entry into the world of true metal was courtesy of a live Meshuggah concert when they were (rather inexplicably) opening for System Of A Down. When they began their performance, my tiny twelve year old brain was nearly incinerated by the pure brutality, heaviness, and incomprehensible technicality of their performance. But the true epiphany came when they played the second track off this album: 'New Millennium Cyanide Christ'. It was at THAT MOMENT, when that first massive tech riff came in, that I knew that metal was my future. There was just some switch that clicked when I heard that song, one of the classics of the Meshuggah pantheon, being played. For months after seeing them, I downloaded Meshuggah MP3s essentially nonstop, but then discovering other artists as well: Morbid Angel, Gorgoroth, all the other extreme metal bands that quickly grabbed me. So on the strength of that song alone, this album easily holds a certain place in my heart and always will.

That being said, now that I'm more well versed in Meshuggah and metal in general, this is probably their weakest album. Due to the new single-mindedness of the compositions, you can easily describe the music here as being extremely brutal and technical, but also extremely repetitive and laced with a lot of filler. There are many memorable sections, but they aren't memorable in a particularly positive or negative way: a specific rhythm/riff pattern just gets caught in your head for no reason in particular. 'New Millenium Cyanide Christ' is the obvious masterpiece of the album: the riffs are positively crushing, the rhythms are deeply complex, but most importantly, the songwriting is some of the finest in Meshuggah's extensive catalog. It's perhaps the most flawless example of Meshuggah's militaristic might: sections of two time signatures, one common time and another one of Tomas Haake's bizarre bass drum configurations, interweave for long sections of musical space, diving in and out of rhythm, before a half second of silence occurs at the end of the stretch, at which point each band member simultaneously piledrives the music back into action with a collective roar. Additionally, the lyrics are some of the best in Meshuggah's history; I remember poring over them when I was younger, in absolute wonder of something so brutal, fantastical, and intricately crafted.

'Concatenation' is a pretty vicious opener with its flurries of atonal chords, and 'Corridor Of Chameleons' is pretty good all around; additionally, 'Neurotica' has some of the best vocal lines I've heard in Meshuggah's discography. But after the cool first half, the album really fizzles out with another four songs that really don't do anything but qualify as pretty generic Meshuggah tracks. Granted, having fifty percent very good tracks is significantly more than most bands are able to do, but considering that this is Meshuggah, it results in a weaker album that would probably be better as an EP composed of the first four tracks. That being said, I do love it; all the songs on it are ones that I heard when I was younger and when everything in metal was completely novel to me. But objectively? No, this is probably the least essential release by Meshuggah, despite the opinions of many of those who are already fans. It's certainly worth a buy for those who love the Swedes' style, but for the average metalhead, the previous release is much more promising.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 It was the first, it's still the best, and it will never be dethroned. The Dillinger Escape Plan's 'Calculating Infinity' is just as much a masterpiece as you've heard from everyone else times a thousand for good measure. It, for all intents and purposes, created the 'tech metal' scene and on the way decapitated anyone who so much as looked at it funny. It's a work of genius on a million different levels, not just for the genre that it created and to this day is the archtypical representation of, but for music as a whole.

Another reviewer, referring to a funeral doom band named Tyranny, once said oftentimes genres are worked out backwards; when a genre is established enough to be a collection of ideas and attributes, the genre is retroactively applied to its beginnings. When 'Calculating Infinity' came out, there was no established 'tech metal' scene, and while this would often have been described by the rather general phrase of 'technical metal', it wouldn't have had any of the established connotations of what it means today. Back then, 'Calculating Infinity' was just this oddity that emerged out of nowhere to make something completely different. And when something is so new and so lacking in a descriptive term, it has to be taken at face value; there was no hand-waving and discounting this as 'just another tech metal record'. It was listened to by everyone and examined for these new traits that it exhibited.

Later on, many bands emulated 'Calculating Infinity' and a handful of other albums (though the formerly mentioned was by far the biggest influence) and created what we now refer to commonly as tech metal. The thing is that no one has ever been able to replicate this album correctly; there's a thousand attempted clonings every month, but they've never been able to crack the magic of this release. That's because it's obfuscated and intentionally misleading in what makes it so special. 'Calculating Infinity' immediately throws off those who can't get past its chaotic surface; numerous reviewers called this stupid, meaningless noise when it came out. It continued to deceive many of the people who attempted to replicate its success, but the reason for this is a bit more complex.

You see, to replicate anything at all, you must reduce it down to a collection of traits and attributes. It could be a cake, a painting, an athletic technique, or an underground tech metal album: these are all things with visible traits that can be employed to replicate them. But regardless of how detailed the traits are, how obsessively they're followed, something is necessarily lost in the translation. It's impossible to replicate anything exactly, because the original was created at one moment, by specific people feeling and thinking specific things, and dozens of more intangible qualities like these throw off any attempt to shackle it down and clone it. There's simply too many variables, too many infinite layers of meaning and artistry in every action, idea, and emotion. And yet, people persist, be it in whatever form they choose to attempt, refusing to acknowledge the fact that, no matter how precise, everything is MORE than a collection of traits, MORE than the superficial sum of its parts, and that what makes it more than this sum is what cannot ever be truly replicated. 'Calculating Infinity', no matter how reverse engineered, broken down, studied piece by piece and examined from any angle, can NOT be replicated because it is not merely a collection of traits to assimilate. Now, this whole lengthy paean on the nature of art is all well and good, but it, too, is leading to something greater. An idea that nearly the entire tech metal scene and musical community at large has failed to realize about 'Calculating Infinity'. The thing that separates it from every other album ever made, and will continue to disconnect it from music at large. It is this, and this alone:

The technicality and tremendous instrumental skill presented on 'Calculating Infinity', in and of itself, is the LEAST important part of the album.

One of the major criticisms leveled at the tech metal scene is a perception that many of the bands are merely playing overly demonstrative songs that have no purpose but to express technicality and extremity. This perception is accurate; there's a number of bands that really do nothing but attempt to be more technical than the next. Of course, this comes from the perspective of a man who would never describe himself as a tech metal fan; while I like a portion of the music, another portion of it seems very meaningless to me. This is why 'Calculating Infinity' is so appealing to me: it works on many levels that are not related to the technicality of the music. I often describe music like visual art, and more specifically, musical techniques as like the painter's palette. More 'colors' on the palette (referring to technical skill) merely increases the detail of the images that you can show; it does not replace the painter's stroke and clarity of vision (songwriting and artistry). 'Calculating Infinity' possesses an enormous palette, to be sure; but this does not negate the most crucial fact: that The Dillinger Escape Plan are truly artistic and gifted writers in the first place.

Yes, the music is mind-bendingly technical on all counts. Each member of the band is overflowing with talent on his respective instrument. But The Dillinger Escape Plan on this album never let technicality get in the way of songwriting, never got too full of their skills and felt a need to show off, and every note, no matter how bizarre, is carefully placed not to be difficult, but to better the songs themselves. Unlike many tech metal bands, 'Calculating Infinity' is not an album full of disconnected, extremely technical parts: this is an album of songs, and brilliant songs at those, songs which better represent tech metal than any other before or after. Technicality is used as a means to an end, and not an end itself. This album is technical out of NECESSITY, not out of a desire to be so, and each of the songs here needs the level of skill demonstrated in it to adequately express it to the listener.

Each song is completely unique, different, and utterly spectacular on all counts. Opener 'Sugar Coated Sour' is my personal favorite: a thousand plays has burned the opening drum/guitar intro irrevocably into my brain. It is the song that perfectly defines The Dillinger Escape Plan: hyperkinetic drums altering the musical plain with constant time signature changes, dizzying, atonal guitar acrobatics creating a musical flesh that is anything but solid, with riffs that spiral up and down the fretboard and only rarely repeat, and roaring, shrieking vocals, stuttering out brief fragments of enormously bitter, minimalist and stunted lyrics. Yet another feature of 'Calculating Infinity' is that it never gets TOO technical for the musicians themselves. In interviews, Mohammed Suiçmez of Necrophagist has stated that his band only really writes songs that take about 60% of their ability to play, allowing them to play with intensity and enthusiasm on stage without having to worry about perfection. The Dillinger Escape Plan is the same way: despite how complex the drumming is, Chris Pennie always sounds like he's truly pounding the living shit out of his drumset, Ben Weinman and Brian Benoit sound like each chord is going to rip the strings from their guitars, and Dmitri Minakakis is going to finally start vomiting blood on this next line. Oh, wait, maybe this one. No, the next...

The music here is exquisitely crafted, and clearly composed in tiny stitches and fragments. And despite how intricate the compositions here are, they also feature a sort of brave minimalism: apart from the instrumental tracks and occasional small sections of the more typical songs, the music is very bare: only drums, guitar, bass, and voice is employed, and even they possess none of the flourishes of many neoclassical artists. Chris Pennie makes an art out of his employment of dynamics; he has exquisite control over the volume and precise sonic qualities of his drum kit. But you can't help but later notice that there actually aren't that many pieces: most of the drum sections on this album are composed merely of snare, bass, hi-hat, and a handful of cymbals. Guitar lines have a good deal more flourish to them, but there are still numerous riffs that are composed of just a handful of notes sharply stitching out micromelodies before diving upwards in some exquisite display of sweep picking. This juxtaposition of the layered and complex with the barren and minimal is just another element that has never been replicated as well by another artist.

While the compositions are highly chaotic, there are incredibly brief, agonizing fragments of emotional nakedness and melody, such as on 'Destro's Secret'. Not unlike Entombed's 'Uprising', Dmitri Minakakis seems to not notice the clean break on this track; a man so used to shrieking in hatred that he's unable to fully stop during a moment of tranquility. The mood on this album is undeniably aggressive and furious, but there are very brief periods of fragile beauty which add an entirely new dynamic to the proceedings. The album could almost be said to resemble a series of days filled with frustration, only interrupted by a brief glimpse of something beautiful (the clean breaks) or in the twilight realm of sleep (the instrumental tracks). Like much tech metal, 'Calculating Infinity' is packed to the brim with the tiny hates and annoyances of white-collar existence, a series of nine to five days which erode one's soul until nothing is left but pure, seething venom towards the world that would force a man into such a position.

Perhaps the final note of considerable importance to what makes this album so exquisite is the lyrics. Every track has multiple phrases that immediately latch onto you and never quite go away ('When rounding out breaks, the silent barrier...', 'I smell that whore!', 'Before dark I'm walking through the rain and scratching on her window screen...', 'Fuck you 'cause I've rotted!', 'Don't! Fall! For me!', et cetera ad infinitum), and they never lapse into the idiocy of 'being random' or weak attempts at humor/barely masked emo streams of consciousness. They're more in the vein of J.R. Hayes' 'uncomfortably personal' writings, albeit with markedly less fantastical content. Instead, they're fragmented tales of everyday life; stories about being lonely, broken, pathetic. The tracks are about the agony of being a failure and self-loathing, and are remarkably realistic in every way. And when combined with the vocal performance of Dmitri Minakakis, they're just made even more exquisite with his vehemence of delivery and bizarre, off-kilter rhythms. The words rarely... stream for more than a moment, at a time, and each word seems SHRIEKED and; broken up at irreg-ular intervals, and sentence,s, just kind of wander, with.! each concept breaking down: and eventually, just like the per-SON they describe;; they sort of... collapse and failjustlikethis.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 I'm never going to pretend that this variety of music is my forté. I am known around The Apparatus as being one of the most highly unqualified people for such a webzine, being the dissenting opinion on many issues involving music and art in general. However, not having heard Khann but being intrigued by their description, I decided to review their 'Tofutopia' full-length demo in hopes of both hearing some interesting new music and gaining a bit of entrence to a community that I'm not particularly knowledgeable in. I'm pleased to say that I derived both from the listening experience: Khann's music is highly interesting, and I'm rather eager to catch one of their infamous live performances soon.

So, for those of you that don't know, Khann play a sort of sludge/grind that's growing increasingly popular these days. There are various possible descriptions: Isis with more anger, Goatsblood with less negativity, Mastodon with less sucking, etc. Perhaps the best parallel would be with Sweden's Crowpath; there seems to be a lot of similarity to that group's 'Son Of Sulfur' release. However, Khann is pretty unique in their own right. Tempos frequently swing from blistering grindcore to ultra-slow sludge on a dime, and each performer seems to play their respective instruments and scream their individual lyrics in a particularly (well, not enthusiastic) insistent manner. Above and beyond this, there's a sense of melody that seems more developed than your average grindy sludgy corey whatever band that makes the music actually enjoyable to listen to on its own right, as opposed to through a lens of progressiveness.

Khann seems to be at their best when they're venturing into post-hardcore or whatever you want to call it Isis-style territory. It's subtle, but most certainly there on songs like 'Black Water Permiates', 'Leeches', or, the best track on the demo, 'Squall'. If you can let yourself soak in this moments which seem to represent Pelican listening to too much Napalm Death, then you'll be faced with easily the best and most emotional (though I'm sure they'd hate that descriptor) parts of this release. Hell, I'd even describe those parts as sublime. The noisy parts are all well and good, but if you look at the songs as being structured in an almost post-rock way (with the noisy parts as the instrumental sections and the emotional parts as the climaxes), the overall feel of the music is greatly improved.

Flaws? Well, it's pretty damned inconsistent, to be honest. I'd say the music jumps around a little too much, but of course this is simply a matter of taste more than any objective critique. It seems that certain songs on here are designed to fit some sort of percieved requirement for 'brutal' music; the gap between tracks like 'Squall' and the lesser ones like the title track is just too damned big to ignore. Luckily, the good parts are so damned good that you can easily ignore the less pleasant portions and just bask in the ones that work so flawlessly. I'd say that if Khann concentrated on tracks such as 'Squall' (which really seems to represent their personal style), they could be one of the premier bands in the... whatever, I'm not going to bother to find a genre, scene.

So, 'Tofutopia' generally works out with more hits than misses, much to my pleasure. Check it out here and check them out live; I certainly will be.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 Meshuggah is not an artist whose style changes with every album like Sigh, nor do they exist in a completely static artistic realm like Bolt Thrower. In each sequential album there is a change; albeit one a great deal more subtle than in most artists. Play any two Meshuggah albums side-by-side and you'll likely only first hear the erratic, piledriving guitar chugs and barking vocals, and probably for the few listens after that. And there are people that find great joy merely in those barest of techniques that the band uses, merely enjoying the odd time signatured pummeling that the band delights in. To those who listen a bit more closely, or to those more versed in the band's music, however, more details are collected: the delicate shifts of mood, texture or atmosphere, the subtle, polyrhythmic dance, where instruments play along out of time for some strange number of measures before falling like a perfect hammer into the lockstep rhythm of the section's beginning. But on that fall, there might be something new; a change in cymbal, a minimalist, sinuous lead, a few extra scattered beats placed ever so precisely in the morass of thick, monstrously stormy riffs. And it is indeed a set of features and emphases that many simply cannot appreciate: these are merely not factors that a large number of people can truly find enjoyable. But for those that do love the machinelike assault of this artist, there's not one that does the style better.

'Destroy Erase Improve' is, at least in my estimation, Meshuggah's greatest work. On their earliest works, Meshuggah had resembled an extremely developed, apocalyptic form of thrash metal; after this album, on 'Chaosphere', the technical and industrial elements of the band came to dominate their style, essentially completely excising any of their identifiable thrash metal past. The material on 'Destroy Erase Improve', however, forms the bridge between their two styles, with more of the traditional song structures and identifiably melodic riffs of thrash as well as the extremely technical aspects of their later works, and this marriage creates their best release, being both satisfyingly experimental and technical as well as grounded in perceptible song structures. Consider it the Meshuggah equivalent of Gorguts' 'From Wisdom To Hate', though unlike that album, Meshuggah's second LP can't be viewed as any sort of concession to the audience.

The opener of this album shows why it's so crucial in Meshuggah's discography: 'Future Breed Machine', arguably THE Meshuggah song, is not only the band's perpetual closer to every live set, but practically the band's definitive musical mission statement. It is easily one of the finest songs the band has ever written, with each section being memorable despite the almost quintessentially unmemorable style that Meshuggah plays, at least to those more unfamiliar with the intricacies of their style. From the grinding machine-sound intro to the sudden burst of strobing searchlight lead over traditional Meshuggah mechanical devastation, then suddenly moving into a sudden post-thrash riff before the vocals begin, every second is completely memorable and completely perfectly designed. There are numerous high points beyond it, the most obvious of them all, though. 'Soul Burn' is a personal favorite, with its high-speed delivery and staggered, doubletracked vocal lines. 'Terminal Illusions' is possibly the most straightforward and aggressive track on the album, also notable for its surprisingly direct anti-religious theme as opposed to Meshuggah's typically abstract meditations.

The very best on the album, however, would be 'Suffer In Truth', a track that's slower pace and pounding, martial performances create an even more ominous than normal atmosphere, especially when combined with its air-siren leads that circle ominously above the battlefield below like so many choppers. Experimentation is, as stated before, very readily present: mellow ambient instrumental 'Acrid Placidity' forms a well-placed intermission between two of the most aggressive tracks on the album. But the most obviously atypical track is probably closer 'Sublevels', which eschews most of the typical chug in favor of a more subtle, slowly descending fusion-influenced track, with drums, quiet guitar and spoken word vocals forming the body between occasional bursts of ferocious grinding.

Some criticism could be leveled at perceived filler: 'Vanished' or 'Inside What's Within Behind' probably aren't as strictly necessary as the other tracks on the album, but I'd say they help establish a more solid bedrock for the music to build upon, with the more unique tracks building off the more 'standard' ones. No, 'Destroy Erase Improve' does not have the absolutely single-minded focus of essentially all of Meshuggah's other albums, but it is all the better for it: this is easily the most varied of all their albums, and also the one with the most unique songs, as opposed to later releases which generally feature about half excellence and half album expanders. And to be honest, the music here is simply a great deal more memorable than on most other Meshuggah CDs, with enough of their thrash roots to give the songs a more cohesive yet varied structure but still maintain the distinctive musical flavor of the band. If any Meshuggah album was to be described as 'essential', it would probably be this one, even for those who typically dislike the band.

Fun fact: A live version of 'Suffer In Truth' is what encouraged me to pick up drumming.

 Friday, 14 December 2007 Q: How pretty can metal be?

A: This pretty.

As one delves deeper and deeper into the metal scene, one frequently becomes preoccupied with ugliness and all its variations. Be it Planet AIDS' crumbling drone apocalypse, Intestinal Disgorge's shrieking, gore-drenched musical suicide, or Senthil's traipses into the realm of utter negativity, it seems that as one discovers more of our music, one distances oneself from simple aesthetic beauty. There does seem to be a revival of sorts in the classical appearance of beauty within metal: the success of artists like Wood Of Ypres can testify that such a concept has not been forgotten. However, I believe that if enough people hear it, Melancolia's 'The Dark Reflections Of Your Soul' will be the album to bring heavy metal back to the purity of heart that now seemingly lies dormant within the community.

Have you ever become so overcome with the beauty of the world that it seems nearly too much for you alone to handle? Have you ever been overwhelmed by sakura blossoms in the spring, by an incredible story in a much-loved book, by conversation with a lover? These are the moments that this album reflects. Entirely devoid of two of what many would say are the most defining elements of metal, darkness and aggression, 'The Dark Reflections Of Your Soul' strips away our preconceived notions of what metal should or should not be, and leaves an album of absolute purity yet entrancing complexity. This genuinely is an album that defies any sort of genre classification; while vague words such as 'progressive', 'metal', or 'melodic' can be thrown around, but none of these can truly capture the essence of the music on this recording. Perhaps my previous statement is a misnomer: this album does indeed contain aggression, but it is an aggression born out of fervor and zeal towards life and the very act of living to its fullest. This is absolutely the soundtrack to self-discovery and positive introspection.

Melodies weave in and out and leave trails of glorious musical mist in their wake, and yet possess an stunning fragility to their construction, as if they were each very gently plucked from the sonic aether, hand-picked for what could best represent the very essence of beauty in music. I fear describing the music of this release excessively: I truly believe that too much study of its structure could damage its artistic beauty and leave one unable to fully appreciate what is contained herein. This is not an album for study, for tabbing, for rewinding and analyzing: no, this is an album to wash over you like a wave of pure, concentrated light, that is both fragile and powerful. Elements that will be noticed: melodies that never repeat, only evolve; immensely complex rhythms; songs that have neither beginning nor ending, and like Israel's Animus only represent a fragment from a greater stream of music. While this album is split into nine seperate tracks, it is actually composed of individual pieces held only loosely together by the most tenuous and airy of keyboard-based ambient segments.

Over and over, I've repeated one word to describe this album to friends: pure. It is the essence of what 'good' is; not a part of any religious morality, but instead the essence of what is correct and right for the world and for ourselves. Nearly like Lykathea Aflame in this way, Melancolia leaves one feeling refreshed and more ready to face and embrace life's challenges than ever. I can't imagine a single person denying the power of tracks like 'The Taste Of You', the melodies of which are both ancient and futuristic and could easily be identified with by any listener with an open mind and heart. This is music of passion, of delight in the possibilities of the world, of a willing ignorance of difficulty being a negative thing. This is such a pretty album. Simple yet complex, savage yet passive, everything and nothing at once: an entity of utterly hypnotizing and delighting brilliance.

This is an album that ostensibly took seven years to create. This is not true; 'The Dark Reflections Of Your Soul' is beyond time or judgment or linearity: it is instead a timeless thing that has been, is, and shall be: the very essence of what it means to be a human.