Meshuggah are a musical singularity. Despite being ostensibly one of the least accessible bands on Earth, the Umeå outsiders have transcended the niche prog metal scene and penetrated the mainstream, becoming shorthand for mastering your instrument and then using it to bully the fuck out of people. They’ve launched their own subgenre (the onomatopoeic ‘djent’), played the Royal Albert Hall and influenced everyone from Deftones to Wolfgang Van Halen.
Fronted by the imperious Jens Kidman and often playing in rhythms which would stump a maths professor, Meshuggah appear too heavy to be huge and too clever for the masses. Yet here we are. And it’s due to something they’ve learned which most others in the tech-metal pool never understand: your songs may be complex, but that doesn’t mean they need to be convoluted.
You can shake your ass to Meshuggah. You can bang your head to Meshuggah. There’s a simple, magnetic bounce hiding in the foundations of all their twisted tracks, and it’s not because drummer Tomas Haake is in some way more limited than any of his peers. It’s because he has the unique ability to play all of the wacky shit they can with his feet, while at the same time playing something completely different with his hands. Listen intently enough to any of their biggest tunes – Bleed, Demiurge, New Millennium Cyanide Christ – and you will hear that back-beat pounding away, laying the groundwork for not just the rest of the song, but the seemingly inexplicable wide appeal the band have won.
This is a huge part of what makes Meshuggah Meshuggah, and it’s why to me they’re the ultimate comfort band. They’re the embodiment of controlled chaos: all the mayhem, catharsis and grit that you get from top-of-the-pile extreme metal, anchored around that ever-reliable heartbeat. That pulse, that 4/4 rhythm, is your port in the world’s most volatile storm. It’d be beautiful, if we were talking about literally anything loftier than stanky riffs coming out of a speaker.
Because of the arranged disarray in everything this band do, I have moved my body to Meshuggah in ways I’d never before imagined. You haven’t truly danced until you’ve thrown shapes to Rational Gaze in a festival field, your knee somehow rising higher than your elbow and your neck darting between directions quick enough to break a compass. And it’s an effect, over the four different times I’ve seen them live, that they always have on me, with the same level of intensity each and every time.
When I listen to Meshuggah, I feel like I’m getting to have my cake and eat it too. I get all the rage that makes extreme metal oh-so-special to me, but I also get stability, something easy to cling to amidst wave after wave of fury. Perhaps that’s what everybody else hears, as well, hence the many, many records they’ve sold and the number of times they’ve performed at Download. I can’t say for certain, but what I can say is that no other band is yet to pull the same, sheer, physical reaction out of me as they do.
