New Road Report with Meshuggah, Baroness, and Decapitated!
7/6/2012 2:12:20 PM by Etiam




If there's a better way to kick off the summer concert season than to utterly dismantle an audience, scramble their insides, and reconstruct them as brain-blasted Borg, then I don't know of it. In other words, Meshuggah are back. After officially achieving a worldwide blockbuster with 'ObZen' in 2008, the band has returned from dormancy with 'Koloss', a dense puzzle of a record instantly recognizable as Meshuggah and yet still guaranteed to stir new controversy and confusion. It is overall a more tuneful record, at least relatively speaking, with more distinctly separated songs than metrical treatises. In the likes of 'Do Not Look Down', we may even recognize the qualities of a 'single', though hardly for the wrist-snapping hypnosis of their last and biggest hit, 'Bleed'. Rather, Meshuggah in this new decade—and closing in on their third as a band, remarkably—is pushing at the boundaries of their style in new ways, with more actual riffs that seem simple until physically attempted and massive passages bordering on sludge psychedelia. They are slowing things down, opening them up, and breaking them down to their absolute base elements. And then grinding them into stardust.

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