Customer Reviews

ObZen

5 star:		(59)
4 star:		(12)
3 star:		(4)
2 star:		(2)
1 star:		(5)

 

 

You know...it's amazing how one concert experience could turn a person into a huge fan of a band. This is what happened to me when I saw Meshuggah open for Tool a few years back...at the time when their album "Nothing" was released. After purchasing that cd, and listening to the whole thing...I knew for a fact I found a band that was special in their own right. Therefore I decided to buy all the albums Meshuggah had ever put out, even including their "True Human Design" EP and acquiring a burnt copy of "Self-Caged" (as it is terribly difficult to find)...and damn...I'm glad I did.

Now we fast forward to the present, Meshuggah has put out yet another incredible album that simply defies categorization...ObZen. I cannot stress enough exactly how astounding Tomas Haake's skills are on the drums. Being a former drummer myself, it's very easy to just sit back and listen in near-disbelief...It's one thing to drum what I guess you would call "modern"...and yes actually on this album Tomas Haake does stray away a bit from the polyrhythmic patterns Meshuggah is well known for, but make no mistake, those patterns are still present.

The second the first track "Combustion" began...I already knew I was in for a treat. It doesn't start out heavy at first, but after the tranquil guitar playing is done for a few seconds...BAM! A perfect opening song...I won't even bother describing it, just buy this album and see for yourself.

The one track I was already familiar with was "Bleed", as I heard it before the album even came out...hardly a skippable track, and this is one of the songs where it actually has more of a conventional sound than all of that polyrhythmic stuff you would expect when you listen to these guys. Nonetheless, I feel so damn sorry for that bass drum...Tomas Haake beats against it relentlessly as if it insulted his mother.

And yes I know that I keep mentioning Tomas Haake more than all the other members...but I firmly believe he is the backbone of the entire band. Extremely talented drummer...who writes incredible lyrics for Jens Kidman to scream out. On this album, he describes mankind as finding its zen between the obscure and the obscene, but it is not a concept album like "I" or "Catch-33" were. Here is a sample of the lyrics:

(From the song "Combustion")

No more ifs, no bias, no ambiguity

No wondering whether this is it

Clarity so brightly shining

The image so painfully absolute

I wish I could describe this album song by song, but I am terribly sorry...I really can't. You have to hear it to believe. For those who don't like Meshuggah...this album could very well change your mind, it is that good. If in fact it doesn't change your mind, I say walk away and never to listen to Meshuggah again.

All in all...this is a superb contender for Album of the Year, but even if it doesnt win any awards, it won't change the fact that this a highpoint of Meshuggah's career. They are here to stay, and this album proves that.

Somerset Maugham once wrote that there are two kinds of artists in the world. One type of artist will create something with their emotions poured out. Another type of artist creates a piece of art through using their brain. Swedish metallers Meshuggah are exactly that type of artist. It is this very reason that Meshuggah's status in metal is so divided. They do not swarm you through a gust of emotion. They attack you through a hollow barrage of multifaceted time signatures, complex lyrics, and no choruses whatsoever. After the 21 minute "I" and the 44 minute gargantuan "Catch 33", Meshuggah has returned with no mercy on their latest album, ObZen. Ladies and gentlemen, brace yourselves for what you are about to hear because you might not return.

ObZen kicks off in the most unusual way. Meshuggah known for their technical prowess, start an album with a straight forward thrasher. At their listening party, the Meshuggah guys commented that they just wanted to play an old school 80's thrash song again. The first thing one might notice about this album is that it sounds like the guys really enjoyed making this album. Meshuggah has never been one to please the masses and ObZen is no different. The biggest selling point to ObZen is the amount of variety. "Combustion" and "Pineal Gland Optics" show a more organic thrash sound. Chaosphere fans will drool over the seven minute Bleed, the heavier than thou title track, and the frenzied "Pravus". In grand Nothing style, Meshuggah still knows how to hypnotize listeners with the apocalyptic jammers "Electric Red", "Lethargica", and "This Spiteful Snake". Each song really does stand out on it's own which even my favorite Meshuggah album (Nothing) probably couldn't claim.

If there was one term Meshuggah fans were getting tired of, it was the Drumkit from Hell. Granted, Catch 33 was such a guitar dominated album that Tomas recording the drums might have been a waste of time. However, many people balked at the idea that such a talented musician could be omitted from an album. Fear no more, Tomas Haake returns to the forefront in grand style. Tomas once again proves that he is better than you. Never a band to shy away from thought provoking lyrics, ObZen's lyrical focus is based on a society finding harmony through chaos and destruction. Another madman that was held in check for Catch 33 is released. Jens Kidman delivers his greatest vocal performance yet. It is spellbinding to see such a lead vocalist in metal not wither away like some other prominent vocalists *coughTomArayacough*. At this point in his career, what is Fredrick Throndel incapable of doing at this point? He has transformed what it is to be a metal guitarist with jazzy solos and intricate rhythms. He and Mårten Hagström deliver the goods yet again with outros that are so amazing that one wished he or she could hear the end of the song first. However, I must say that ObZen might be the first Meshuggah album that I wasn't blown away by Fredrick solos. Maybe Marten's underlying rhythms are just more enjoyable this time around. Either way, the guys have once again shown why they should be the most divided to metal fans.

ObZen isn't Meshuggah's crowning achievement, and it isn't going to change the way any person feels about Meshuggah. Fans of the older sound will be turned on by the more song by song structure of the album, but if you hate Meshuggah, chances are...you probably still won't like this one. ObZen is just a great album by a band that continues to release unique metal in a sometimes stale genre. I hope to hear some of the new material on the C U LaTour with Ministry this spring. After all, can't it be enough that this band has not produced something as horrid as Diabolus en Musica or St. Anger?

P.S. As a Meshuggah fanboy, I must write that this is probably a 4 to 4.5 rating for the album. I used the 5 to overcompensate for the flood of 1 star reviews that are bound to show up. I wonder why people review bands and albums that they already know they'll hate...

Meshuggah have come a long way. From humble metal roots they have progressed through a miriad of sounds and styles, all the time pushing the borderline of metal, and becoming the most innovative and original band in the genre. So here is their sixth LP "Obzen" - a grand concept album on man's struggle in the modern day world of supposed religious and spiritual wellbeing (hence fusing the words obscene and zen). It's importantly the end of an experimental stage that produced the daring one-song-epics "I" and "Catch Thirty Three". According to the band themselves "Obzen" is their attempt to draw together their sound and various styles from past albums in order to create a balanced and eclectic new direction. This is certainly the case, as "Obzen" effortlessly merges the brutal thrash of "Destroy Erase Improve", the visceral riff-orientated "Chaosphere" and later downtempo grooves of "Nothing" and "Catch Thirty Three". It also sees drummer Tomas Haake back on the kit after his "drumkit from hell" programming on "Catch 33" and the "Nothing" re-release.

I've read reviews arguing "Obzen" is simply a re-run of "Chaosphere", or that it owes most heavily to that album. I have to disagree with this, as I feel "Obzen" borrows equally from past releases. For one thing there's a deal more melody to the riffs here. Take for example the opening two riffs of "Combustion", the lead being extremely melodic for Meshuggah, sounding more similar to Tool at their heaviest. Compare this to the utter abrasive opening riff to "Concatenation" that lacks any hint of melody. "Bleed" and the title track would be the most "Chaosphere" sounding tracks for me, with the later fashioning the kind of riff breakdown that sprawled throughout "Chaosphere".

"Obzen" is noticeably faster as a whole when compared to recent albums, being more on par with the energetic thrash of "Destroy Erase Improve". Moments of punishing speed are employed through most of the tracks, such as "Pineal Gland Optics" which opens with a flurry of intense drumming and machine-gun riffing. Vocals wise I would also draw parallels to "DEI" over other albums. They are slightly more forward in the mix when compared to "Nothing" or "Catch Thirty Three", and with these albums they are used more as rhythmic accents, often sacrificed for instrumental grooves. Like "DEI" the vocal sections are more extended, possibly as there are more lyrics per song.

Where "Obzen" sounds best is when Meshuggah play with dynamics. Thordendal has always enjoyed his eerie atmospheric sections, but they have never sounded so perfectly quiet and brooding as here. "Lethargica" is downtempo Meshuggah at their most lethal, instantly recalling the best of "Nothing", it cuts to a sublime ambient breakdown that gives way to an absolute monolith of a riff. One of the heaviest breakdowns Meshuggah has ever carved out, and a highlight to the album. The epic closer "Dancers to a Discordant System" is my favorite track on "Obzen", opening with quiet guitar ambience it builds to a progressive metal run-through of all stages in Meshuggah's career. The song has it all - eerie atmospheres, pummeling thrash, breakdowns and a face-melting final riff that lumbers with immense groove. Utter perfection for the Meshuggah fan.

It was a risk to attempt an album that can capture all various sounds and styles, but I feel "Obzen" does it with sophistication. The album never sounds jumbled or confused despite switching through such extreme dynamics and tempos. Meshuggah fans should certainly enjoy this, and those new to the band will get a concise taste of what Meshuggah is about.

Like many Meshuggah fans I felt they peaked with their fantastic EP "I" which epitomized everything they were working towards with their polyrhythmic Math Metal approach; and with their highly experimental follow-up album "Catch Thirty Three" I was sure their glory days were behind them. I was mistaken. With "Obzen" there is an amazing infusion of groove added to each and every track, seemlessly infusing this new direction with their already jaw-dropping, calculated Progressive Metal time signatures. Influences from bands like Tool and Mastodon come to mind frequently throughout this recording, the albums "Lateralus" and "Leviathan" most notably. The result is Meshuggah's best and certainly most memorable album yet. Each song sticks with power and precision all the while feeling like parts of brilliant machinery put together into one dynamic creation. Highly recommended.

You know you love a band that upon your second listen of their latest album you're already hankering for them to produce another project. I've had this feeling especially with Autechre's "Untilted" and Meshuggah's "Catch 33". Now the same goes for "ObZen" (not to mention "Quaristice" :-)).

I had no idea as to the extent of Tomas Haake's artistic involvement in Meshuggah as a whole. Apparently he's written the entire lyrical content of the highly focused story of "ObZen" and conceived of its imagery as well; and in its imagery lies a multitude wrapped in a simple vision. That vision is of a cold and immense prison perimeter whose walls rise hopelessly high, whose angles are tyrannically pierced with overlooking sniper towers. The prison is shrouded in sickly and tiresome grey/blue overcast, and beyond its walls lie no sign of human life. In fact, the thick vacuum of silence conveyed by the freezing presence of the concrete architecture acts as a meaningful paradox against the antithetical thunder of the album in play. The bombastic, epiphanic, raging screams of the inner spirit is ultimately defenseless against the weight of the spiritually dead mass of outer environment that slowly and fully permeates its being.

How can one not relate the theme of "ObZen" to the incurable illness of Western spiritual stasis? Have we not reached a point that we all find Zen in the Obscene (as I interpret)? That we define ourselves by the pain we readily inflict? Or perhaps, as reviewer AllOverWith perceives (READ HIS REVIEW), have we not reached a point of spirit-numbing Zen as to be blinded in Oblivion to the fallacious realities we are fed on a daily basis? Have we not been conditioned to reject the alternative suggestions of our pineal glands as mere symbolic, vaporous experiences? Isn't it true that the world has lost its ability to interpret its collective dream of humanity fulfilled? I guess so, for in Haake's own words "the human dream" has been "incinerated, devoured, decieved."

In "ObZen," the bruising intensity of Meshuggah's terrific, brutal anvil bounce is definitively augmented by the terror of Haake's lyrics, a terror that lies in the immediate depiction of a person presently realizing his metamorphosis into a grotesquely robotized state. He simultaneously realizes his incarceration (the numbing of his assimilated will), which he allows with horrific, blissful submission, and finally sees the blunt image of his "evil splendor"--"no more ifs, no bias, no ambiguity...eyes dilated to grasp it all...every illusion of what we are fails...". Throughout the album he paints himself in nihilistic phrases. We are "obedient devices...puppets, finetuned submissive drones...gullibles" whose minds are "reviled [in] everlasting ignorance." We "atrophy," "succumb," "malfunction" under the imminence of a "terminating clockwork" of our "deletion" invited by our "mutinous" psyches. We accept our "lethargic" culture of death with "careless motion[s]" of slaughter by which we "flourish"; we are only half-awake to the reality of our existence, and thus fail to witness the tragedy of our "collapsing dreams." We reach the "state of perfection" in the title track, finding harmony in our "new belief system" defined by "filth...vomit...blood," ruled by the new God of "corruption, war and pain." Turn the page and a spy tower grunts threateningly, an echo throughout the inner darkness stuffed with eager, waiting bullets that have the silent power to "invisibly suppress" the wanderer in the midst of half-observant inmates. The "reality [of] terror," the "voracity of one single day" "asphyxiate[s]" us as the snake of our evil sheds its illusive, "smothering veil". The pineal gland, Descartes' "seat of the soul," awakens in the utter darkness of our horrible reality, confusing our distinction between past and present self, once blind and blissful, now aware and grotesque, refurbished with a "new set of eyes cleansed" by a "new belief." Our warped (Pravus) religion "arm[s] our mind[s]," now "toxic" and "flaunting," with "automatic...black, acidic bile" inspired into projection by our unquenchable "thirst" for depravity. Our new religion is realized: to "DISpirit," to feed off the lives of others, to raise "deceitful spawn" who will carry forth our cultural priorities into the blood-red roads of the future from which we will always look back to the "poisoned nails of history stung...," our destructive blades eternally "swung" in the image of our ancestors. There is finally no escape from "the essence of lies" in our "choreography refined" by "ignorance ever-amplified" in light of "questions unasked" by our "controllable herd," blind, robotized, "withering in toxicity," our only dumb goal but to "appease" the lords of the false comforts who feed us bloated portions of mind-lulling episodes of "discordant" shows. The pivotal vision is the Zen-vogued man, at once aware and stupefied, married to a prison balcony like a Greek sculpture devoted to Violent Illusion, dismembered by the death of his will and the reality of his sin.

Upon first listen, I experienced the premature disappointment that AllOverWith expressed as the failure to be thrilled by Meshuggah's code of "BA-Daaaaa, BA-Da-BEE-Da BA-DAAA" licks that have come to define their polyrhythmic Metal. But I took his advice (thanks!) and have now listened to "ObZen" three times while following along with Haake's lyrics in the booklet (I don't recommend doing this in moving traffic--yikes!); it has made all the difference. While the complex power of Meshuggah's music unquestionably stands tall on its own, the visual absorption of what Kidman is actually screaming TRULY adds an inescapable, virulent layer to the whole sonic experience. In fact, I found that the music comes fully alive, an unmistakably full moon of controlled hysteria. And isn't AllOverWith's suggestion a true, blatant metaphor of "ObZen"'s message as a whole? Is not the more you understand directly correlated to the clarity in which you see and hear?

Witness ObZen. When mankind breaches the prison walls of his falsely conceived realities, then the universe will really be born, emerged from the womb of galactic space to breathe its first real puff of conscious air, a bright new space speckled with our forms that have finally traded places with the inviting gap.

This is the only band I have heard since Metallica that I think has significantly advanced the metal genre.

That statement probably pisses people off, but has anyone else made anything this fresh and effective?

Tool, maybe. But, Tool was not a leap in intensity from Metallica.

"Bleed" is the most savage song I have ever heard.

Love it. This album should come with a Surgeon General's Warning.

If you think DEI can't be topped than you might be wrong after popping in ObZen by Meshuggah. This surpasses all techincal limits the band ever faced. Now toiling in the chaotic realm of eight string guitars Meshuggah will allow you to enter the most abstract and surreal auditory landscapes with ObZen. I remember being out of my mind high listening to Chaosphere for the first time and finally accepting the unbridled mayhem that IS Meshuggah. I must not lie and admit upon first purchasing Chaosphere back in early '99 I was unable to understand the polyrythmic artistry and threw the album aside to dig into my Deftones records. Now I can say I listen to Meshuggah more than the Deftones and any other bands I have been into from the past. Meshuggah is not only for the metal heads when I saw them live their audience attracted a diverse lot people who probably weren't into extreme metal. If you want to check this band out for the first time ObZen is entry level yet advanced for any music listener. A standout track off this album which is almost the fastest song they've written is "Pravus", check it out I saw them play it live.

Well, Meshuggah has done it again. They've been my favorite act for some time now, but I never thought they could surpass their brutal Chaosphere album. After tons of listens to Obzen, I think they've surpassed it - and this is coming from someone who loves every last one of their releases.

What makes this album so interesting is how distinctive each of its songs are. Every track has a feature that is unique and immediately identifiable. The songs themselves are incredibly dense, but some tracks are actually more accessible than in the past. Take Combustion, the album opener - it is very different than anything Meshuggah has done since, well, Contradictions Collapse. It is as straightforward as they come, but devastatingly heavy. Electric Red is the perfect contrast to this song, which features all the things that we've come to know and love from Meshuggah - parts of it towards the end are reminiscent of Thordenthal's Sol Niger Within album (and yes, this is a very, very good thing).

I could write pages about each individual song, but there are some obvious highlights. The twisted, subtly changing but impossible to play rhythms from Bleed (possibly the greatest display of musical stamina in the history of metal). The absolutely skull-crushing opening of the title track. Pineal gland Optics' Chaosphere-esque breakdown 2 minutes into the song. The furious, pseudo-triple-meter, demonic dance of "Dancers to a Discordant System," and Thordenthal's guitar solo in it.

And that's just the tip of the iceberg. If you want to hear some of the most crushingly heavy and rhythmically difficult music in metal history, you need to pick this album up. If you're a Meshuggah fan, doesn't matter what era or album you like the best - you'll find many things to like on Obzen. Get it and listen, now.

I was instantly drawn to ObZen by the amazing artwork which was characteristically ominous but at the same time rather open and lighter than a lot of other mtal album artworks. I could tell from then that this would be something different, and it does not dissapoint.

To start with the title track, obZen: This is a true testament to the shear brutality and tightness of Meshuggah. The tight, incredibly clear 8 string riff the resonates throughout the track is like having a ton of bricks be dropped on your chest. The vocal of Jens Kidman are powerful and controlled, and most of all, consistent that never seem overdone or boring. But then again, Meshuggah is definitely not a band that thrives on subtlety. The whole song is a mixture of incredible performances by each band member, a sense of catchiness and amazing production that turns this track into one of the heaviest on the album.

One cannot ignore track 3, Bleed, which in my opnion is one of the most amazing, brutally heavy and creative tracks to come from the album. Kudos must be given to each member to hold their own for seven minutes of unrelentless playing of an extremely challenging riff, and taking into consideration the number of changes and modulation that occurs throughout, this is truly one of Meshuggah's finest moments.

The album overall is quite a shift from the earler Meshuggah. The album appears more intent on unbelievable creativity and tightness rather than brash and over-the-top attitude. ObZen is extremely focused, withe each song showcasing a new and interesting side to the band's capabilities. The heavy use of 8 string guitars creates an almost gutheral tonality that broods and festers.

ObZen is definitely not a work of Meshuggah's to dissapoint. Highly recommended.

When played at certain volumes this album will cause Black Holes. If you call yourself a fan of metal then you should own this. Buy now!