Meshuggah - Nothing

Djental Plan

A while back, I had gotten the idea to start another review series (woo so original bh what a braingenius), this next one being an exploration into djent.  It's a genre that I barely know and never cared for but always insisted was a legitimate subgenre of metal and wanted to explore why more people didn't.  I had a whole series of albums picked out from the first seeds to the modern era where I outlined how it developed and why it became so insular... before I got to the modern era and hit a wall for two solid years.  Turns out I wasn't as interested as I thought and boy it's hard to write about things you neither enjoy nor give a shit about.  So fuggit, I'm gonna rewrite the first in that series since it kinda encapsulates every problem I've ever had with this band.  Enjoy my crumbs you peasants!

I've seen some weird takes in recent years that Meshuggah aren't really djent since they still fit more with the metal scene than the newer djent scene, but man I'm old enough to have been on the internet in the early/mid 2000s when Meshuggah was the only game in town, I saw the term "djent" itself spawn from an onomatopoeia of the guitar tone on obZen, they are consistently considered the godfathers of the genre, if you go to RYM and search for "best djent albums all time", the top seven results are all Meshuggah albums and the Doom Eternal soundtrack, they're fucking djent and claiming otherwise is as absurd as saying Slayer isn't thrash metal.

But I do see why this take happens.  They were indisputably thrash metal with a really techy twist on Contradictions Collapse, they tend to be much heavier than most of the djent scene, it took like 10+ years for true imitators to spring up, most of their fans from around the time they blew up tended to be fans of prog metal, they never incorporated clean vocals, their metal roots are just way more legit than the bands that came later.  From the dozens of seconds I spent googling shit, it seems like their true watershed moment and the instance that saw them become the inimitably unique creature they are (that paradoxically spawned a billion imitators) wasn't actually their first forays into the style on Destroy Erase Improve or Chaosphere, but actually 2002's Nothing, as it was the one to first incorporate "8 string guitars".  I'm putting that in quotes because though the guitars were developed at the time and the album was written with them, they weren't actually used on the album since they had shit intonation and constantly fell out of tune as a result of being so new that nobody had really figured out how to make them work perfectly.  So while they weren't truly introduced until the 2006 rerecording when technology finally caught up to what the band was doing, this original 2002 version still stands as (to my knowledge) the first time the sound was introduced to the world, albeit on downtuned 7 strings to emulate the sound they couldn't yet perfect.

So with that in mind, from the perspective of a dude who really didn't "get it" at the time, what did Nothing contain that was so special?  Well as mentioned, it was truly the guitar sound that separated this from the previous two albums.  Destroy Erase Improve and Chaosphere had already introduced their utterly strange songwriting and performance techniques, but this is the one that pushed them over the edge by giving them the X factor that is this incredibly beefy and destructive tone.  It's not like scooped mids and double bass didn't exist before 2002, obviously, but something like Chaosphere was fast, and the simple act of slowing down to highlight their brain-bending polyrhythms and lurching sense of atemporal insanity was the final piece of the puzzle along with a guitar tone that was deeper and more menacing that R'lyeh.  I think their previous work indicated a slow evolution into a different style of metal, whereas Nothing saw them abruptly launch into an entirely new style of art in general.  They were off-kilter and weird before, but tracks like "Straws Pulled at Random" and "Organic Shadows" are so catawampus and disorienting that they make me legitimately uncomfortable.  This menacing heaviness and spaced out sense of rhythm was unlike anything else at the time, inevitably leading to tons of comparisons to jazz despite sounding absolutely nothing like it.  Jazz is notable for its incredibly complex sense of harmony but Meshuggah leapt in the opposite direction, focusing all of their wacky experimentation on rhythm and rhythm alone.  I'm sure there's some complex scientific reason that the leads all sound like either floaty soundscapes or flittering spasms with a million notes on the highest frets, but the real intrigue comes from the inhuman sense of rhythm.  They don't dazzle you with their speed, as noted, it's more the fact that it makes very little sense unless you break down some complex math problem.  Haake's drums are so complex that they loop around to sounding simple, keeping a steady 4/4 beat with his hands but using his feet to pound away in perfect synchronization with the guitars as they chug through impossible to count 13/27 or whatever rhythms.  The skill it takes to take something so complex and make it seem like child's play is absolutely staggering.  And the fact that they utilize this unfathomable precision to pummel you with such crushing weight defies any human explanation.

The overwhelming heaviness of the album simply can't be overstated.  There are mercilessly few breaks for clean guitars, and when they do happen (like the intro to "Obsidian") they act as punishingly brief oases for you to catch your breath before you're thrown back into the grinder.  It's kind of similar to what I remember Swans sounding like (don't hold me to this, everything I know about swans comes from The Ugly Duckling), being very repetitive and very awkward, with extremely few note changes as the songs grind you to dust with sheer weight and attrition.  It's very intentional in its repetition as well, I don't doubt for one second that the album turned out the way it did purely because its intention was to overwhelm you with the musical equivalent of an anxiety attack as opposed to the band simply not being very creative.  It's a technical marvel to have achieved a guitar tone as punishingly heavy as this while retaining absolute clarity, it's all beef and no crunch, and really nobody was doing that in 2002.

And here's where we hit the big caveat, and the reason I was never really much of a Meshuggah fan despite all the praise in the previous few paragraphs.  Nothing's greatest strength is also its greatest weakness.  Every single good thing about it can be explained with complex musical theory and technical jargon, but when pressed to explain any sort of overarching emotion, people tend to come up flat.  It's music for STEMlords; hypernerds who see art as a puzzle to be solved as opposed to an overarching feeling or message to experience.  Nothing is exactly what it says on the tin, it has absolutely nothing to say beyond "look how logically complicated I am!"  It's the musical manifestation of those weird dorks defending Elon Musk in your twitter mentions.  It's music for people who take the Rick and Morty bit about how "love is just a chemical in your brain that compels you to breed" as a real cool and good perspective to view the world through.  Breaking the world down into chemical compounds is helpful for study but absolutely dogshit for experience.  I like music because I like art and I like feeling.  Even just within the confines of metal; it can run the gamut of both sound and emotion, from bands as disparate as Blind Guardian and The Crown making you feel a million feet tall, both atmospheric black metal and unremittingly brutal funeral doom can make you feel miserable, death metal can act as a cathartic release for all of your anger and violent impulses, metal can do almost anything and Meshuggah does precisely none of it.  Sci-fi nerds should watch Contact and really internalize why that "they should have sent a poet" line is so iconic.  I can't tell you the riffs are bad if I can't justify carving out a new wrinkle in my brain to even remember the riffs from this vacuous antimemetic anomaly.

Of course, this comes down purely to taste, and this just means that Meshuggah isn't really for me, and that's okay.  But the whole reason I even listened to them in 2023 despite not liking them for fifteen years is because I don't think djent is a broken genre on a conceptual level.  I think they unlocked an entirely new realm of expression and then completely squandered it with a monochromatic approach.  Nothing leaves me cold because it comes off as a completely colorless thought experiment as opposed to a way to express existential confusion and crisis, which I suspect might have been the aim here.  There are moments of adrenaline-raising brilliance like the main riff of "Perpetual Black Second" or wonderfully crushing tracks like "Stengah" and "Straws Pulled at Random", but on the whole this feels less like music and more like science, and it turns out that doesn't result in something I really want to experience all that often.  The massive tone and few moments of groovy deliciousness don't do enough to counteract the achilles heel of the album simply not being all that interesting beyond a purely scientific lens.

RATING: 33%