ABORT Magazine™

Album Review: Meshuggah – Koloss

CD Review: Meshuggah
Koloss
Nuclear Blast

Every Meshuggah release has generally seemed so complex on early listens that they have required a good degree of bedding-in time in order for everything to fully fall into place. On those early listens, though, you always knew that perseverance would lead to something very special. On Koloss the initial reaction is one of shock; a fear that the kings of off-meter ingenuity have gotten lazy and retired on the back of a bland album of musical mediocrity. It seems so simple – so immediately palatable – that it’s nothing short of an utter disappointment.

So, where do repeated listens lead? Well, Koloss is a reverse-engineered Meshuggah of sorts where, rather than the listener being required to decipher a myriad of unconventional arrangements in order to become wholly intimate with the material, the songs now sound so simple and accessible that they’re familiar from the offset, only to let their technical non-conformity unravel with each listen. This is Meshuggah at its most organic and fluid since DEI and Chaosphere and seems more the product of an out-of-body jam session where the songs have oozed from a collective higher-subconscious rather than taken shape through a multitude of lengthy songwriting sessions. In short, to take on the Koloss listening experience is to embark on a journey to sonic heaven.

The variation within Koloss is something of a wonder; from the chugging opener “I Am Colossus” (the closest thing to typical Meshuggah to be found on the album) and the uneasy sluggishness of “Behind The Sun” to the driving ‘shuggah-thrash’ of “The Demon’s Name Is Surveillance” and “The Hurt That Finds You First” (the band’s heaviest, fastest and most complex album composition to-date) the Swedes have left no musical anomaly to chance, adding a sprinkling of ethereal undertones throughout to convey a general eeriness on the album. With each spin it gets better and better – darker, heavier, more intricate, more beautiful, more brutal, more… perfect.

Just when you thought it was safe to put on a set of headphones and have a casual listen to the Umeå mind-mangler it sneaks up on you and leaves your head a blubbering mess as you wonder just how the hell it did it. It is clear now that the five members of Meshuggah no longer work as a unit. Instead, they have become one. There is a difference and that difference is Koloss(al).

Album out March 23rd 2012 (Europe) March 26th 2012 (North America)

M E S H U G G A H

By John Norby

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