Meshuggah unleash a labour-of-love beast!
Twenty years young and Meshuggah are back with a new record titled ‘obZen’ that further demonstrates their mastery of mathematic metal.
As with most releases from the Swedish legends, recording took much longer than scheduled and it led to the cancellation of a previously booked European run with The Dillinger Escape Plan at the end of 07.
“Our idea was to have the album finished in July, but once we got into late August and September we were still in the studio and we realised we would have to scrap the tour altogether,” drummer Tomas Haake told Rock Sound. “The initial idea was to do that tour in direct support of both our new releases, and when Dillinger didn’t get their record out on time we felt like we should take the time. We really wanted it to sound complete
with no afterthoughts, we felt that we had to remain in the studio and not get bothered with the hassles of preparing for a tour, touring,then returning to the studio all of which would have further delayed the album.” Unfortunately for Meshuggah, Dillinger were not the most understanding of tour partners and did little to hide their disappointment when it came to announcing the cancelled tour. “They were definitely not happy about it,” Haake said. “They felt mistreated by us for that but I talked to Ben [Weinman, Dillinger guitarist] after we decided to cancel and there were no hard feelings. He just thought it was a real shame that the dates did not happen, but he could also understand our reasons for doing it.”
The delays were mostly caused by the band’s constant quest for perfection, mixed with their latest polyrhythmic challenge: playing in perfect off-time at 170 beats per minute. Sound simple? Anything but. This subtle change led to all manner of difficulty for Haake, who returned to the kit to record live after the programmed beats of previous outing ‘Catch Thirtythree’. In fact, the band’s decision nearly made him redundant. “I started practising the album in November 2006,” the sticksman told us. “By May 2007 when we started recording I still did not have some of my parts down. ‘obZen’ is definitely more technical in a lot of ways, and while it is not something that necessarily comes across to the listener, there is some harder stuff on the record that took a lot of time for me to learn.”
It is surprising the album even got finished, espe-cially when Haake and the band started tinkering with the record in the studio.
“During last summer we started rewriting aspects as some songs just felt half-done,” the drummer said. “We had to go back and dig into them to make them work. We also spent a lot of time on the vocals because of the sheer fact that not only do they have to work in lyrical and sonic terms, but there is also a big rhythmical factor to the vocal line because of the heavily accented music we play. The vocals need to fuse with the music, so we spent time working out how they need to interact with the music in each song.” So, are the band taking a well-earned break now the record is finished? No, they are in rehearsals working out whether they can play any of ‘obZen’ live. No, Rock Sound is not joking. Expect this bad-boy to drop on March 03; check out an exclusive preview track from the album on this month’s Sound Check CD.
From Rock Sound
