For all the accolades heaped upon records like Destroy Erase Improve, and the album’s undeniable influence, it was something thatMårten Hagström and the rest of Meshuggah were working on over 17 years ago. In 2012, Meshuggah are trying todistance themselves from the scene they helped create with their seventh studio record, Koloss. Discussing how they’re trying to separate themselves from what they’ve done before, Hagström explains with their latest record, Meshuggah felt the only avenue left for the pioneering technical band to explore was not being technical.
“This album is less obvious in the manner that normally when people listen to us their immediate reaction is ‘oh this is really strange and really technical and so forth’ and that technical aspect is something that we haven’t really liked. It’s not why we make music, the expression is supposed to be cool and different. It doesn’t really matter if it’s supposed to be weird or hard to play. And this time it’s a bit more subtle.”
Though Meshuggah may have distanced themselves from some of their earlier material, Hagström posits that the band still live by the creed set out in the title of their landmark 1995 record. Koloss is another shining example of how the band is so adept in destroying, erasing and improving on what’s it done previously.
It’s this doctrine which has led to the Swedish band distancing themselves from blindingly technical music that marked a string of releases throughout the ’90s. Since their 2008 release ObZen, the ‘djent’ scene has rose to prominence in the extreme music landscape, and though Meshuggah reign as the undisputed kings of the scene, now playing technical death metal doesn’t seem as unique or interesting when done so amongst a sea of lesser imitators.
Instead of writing in the same style of blisteringly technical albums like 2002’s Nothing and 2005’s Catch Thritythree, Messhugah went back to the drawing board. This time around, Meshuggah, fundamentally altered their approach to writing music to make a record that stood out from their back catalogue. For the Koloss sessions, the band, who are known for having members write songs separate of one another, came together to ensure that the music was as good as it could be.
“This one turned out to be a very collaborative album. We sat down and really worked it in terms of arrangements and what parts to use or to not use. So we’d always have someone who hadn’t written the material to be able to come with extra, outside input.”
The end result of the five-piece writing music together is something that is liable to be regarded as one of the band’s strongest efforts to date. An album that is more interesting and better utilises some of the subtleties the band hinted at on ObZen. Because for Hagström and his crew, who are all adept at writing technical riffs in bizarre time signatures, writing music that could be both subtle and extreme was the best test of their song writing abilities.
“This is maybe a record that you listen to it and you think ‘oh, this is quiet straightforward’, but then you listen to it and you go into detail and you come to realise it’s actually the opposite.”
I suggest to Mårten that the subtleties of the Koloss material are going to make the live shows to promote the new record very interesting and he agrees before explaining how Meshuggah have always had an uphill battle when it comes time to introduce their records to fans at the live show.
“It will be funny to see how this record is received by fans when we start to play it live. In retrospect since ObZen came out people have been saying how that album did really well and sold really well and people tend to think of it as a really good album and that’s cool. But when it just came out, a lot of fans are disappointed. And now I don’t hear that anywhere. Just a few months after its release there were a lot of disappointed people. And that’s something that’s always happened with our albums.
“To an extent I think it’s a good thing, because if you do something that people that have to adjust to instead of giving them something were they can say ‘oh that’s exactly what I was expecting and exactly what I wanted’. That’s never what we’ve stood for. We’ve always tried to mess with people a little bit.”
BY TOM HERSEY
