BAND HISTORY
Formed in 1985 in Umea, Sweden Meshuggah developed a very unique style of playing metal. The band has thrash-metal as a steady platform and they experiments with different types of music. The band was created by the frontman
Roger Olofsson, the two guitarists
Peder Gustafsson and
Fredrik Thordendal, bassist
Janne Wiklund and the drummer
Orjan Lunmark. The band was called
Metallien at the beginning but after a few demos and with only
Fredrik Thordendal left of the all the members the band got the name
Meshuggah plus a new line-up. They are still an active band and this was their first full released album called
''Contradiction Collapse''.
ALBUM INFORMATION
Meshuggah is known for their unique style of heavy-metal, the have a platform of thrash-metal and then they add on different styles of music. Just take a look at the track titles and you can start to imagine how the music sounds like. The tempos are not flowing in the songs, the instruments are very heavy and the vocals sounds like a blend between
Phil Anselmo (Pantera) and
James Hetfield (Metallica). The music is very complex and hard to ''understand'' or get into, if you are unused to this band's music you might get a hard time to get into them. This is one or the only album that has more ingredients of thrash-metal than of the more experimantal stuff which is some of
Meshuggah's specialties.
''Contradictions Collapse'' is not a bigger success for the band compared to their latest material but this album would by a satisfying moment for the fans of
Mesuggah
THE BAND MEMBERS
The line-up for this album was and still are
Jens Kidman as the vocalist,
Fredrik Thordendal as the guitarist,
Peter Nordin as bassist (only former band member in this album) and the drummer is
Tomas Haake. I think that
Jens sounds like a mix between the two singers I mentioned, the vocals are low, dark and harsh, nearly growling vocals. This is not skilled vocal work, there are no melodic moments in the vocals excpet in a very few small sections in some of the songs. But the vocals makes the band very heavy in its sound though. The guitarist
Fredrik does a good job on the rhythm sections, the riffs are very heavy and sometimes catchy, you can hear that the riffing is thrash-metal inspired because of the complexity and structure. The guitar solos are though absolute desaster, it doesn't even sounds like the solos are played on a guitar. The solos has a bad flow, non-catchy and not even close to melodic stuff.
Peter the bassist is one of the members that really stood out with his instrument, the bass is superb in this album even though it is playing along the guitars. The bass sounds very heavy, brutal and quite mechanic in its sound, it really stands out when it comes to the sound. The bass helps to form the brutal and heavy atmosphere in the material, very good performance here.
Tomas drumming didn't felt ok with me here, the patterns had a complicated structure and few of the patterns were catchy. The drums were though quite heavy time to time but most of the time they felt wierd, uncatchy and nearly boring. If the drum speed was raised with several bpm's the songs had been way more better if you ask me.
THINGS I LIKED ABOUT THIS ALBUM
The things I liked about this album was that it was so heavy, this was very heavy stuff and I liked it pretty much. The doomsday bass and dense riffing and shredding created a very gloom and devastating sound along with the brutal vocals. I also liked the bands way to create this unique sound that they have, the complexity in the songs was more intersting rather than entertianing but there was a couple of songs that grabbed my attention pretty good. Songs like
Greed and
Erroneous Manipulation was faster than most of the songs and they had catchy song structures and very heavy tunes. The vocals was quite interesting too, though they sound similar to most of todays vocalsits but the vocals gave some extra flavour to the sound. The band felt a bit extreme and the attitude was a bit bad a**, most times
Jens delivers harsh and dark singing but he also lets out a few very deep growls here and there.
THINGS I DISLIKED ABOUT THE ALBUM
Unfortunatly there was more things that was bad than good for me when I listened to this album. One thing that really bugged me was the stupid drum patterns in the songs, they were heavy but there was no real flow in any of the songs. When you felt that the drums went faster they suddenly lost the speed and started to ''get stuck'', this really ruined most of the songs and made them boring. The second thing that annoyed me was the guitar solos, I have never heard solos this bad in my entire life. It didn't even sound like a guitarist was performing the solos, it sounded like computer edited noises instead of guitar strings. It was though one single solo or maybe two solos that sounded like a real guitar but the rest sounded like c**p. That was the major things that I thought was the biggest problems with this material but there was a little small thing that also annoyed me. The instruments basically followed each other and when the drums started to get stuck the other instruments also seemed to get stuck.
MY CONCLUSION
I can remember that I have listen to
Meshuggah's latest work I thought then that it sounded a bit wierd, but now when I have listen to a whole album I thought it sounded very wierd. I have never experienced this kind of metal before, it was both good and bad but from my part this was more bad than good. The biggest reasons to why I thought that this was bad was the strange drum patterns and the guitar solos but other than that I thought this was pretty decent stuff. I have no idea to what people I would recommend this album to fans of
Mesuggah, and if you want to expand your metal collection or if you are looking for something different you should take a look at this. Thank you for reading this and I hope it was to a good help, comments are always welcome.
The overall album rating will be: 3.5/5
