Meshuggah - Obzen
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Music CD Cover
Artist: MeshuggahEdition: Music CD
Audio: English (Original Language)
CD Release Date: 2008-03-11
Music Label: Nuclear Blast America
Product features:
- MESHUGGAH OBZEN
Free Music Notes for Obzen
Free Music Review: Why did NASA "lose" the moon-landing tapes?
Hit: 5 Stars
You know you love a band that upon your second listen of their latest album you're already hankering for them to produce another project. I've had this feeling especially with Autechre's "Untilted" and Meshuggah's "Catch 33". Now the same goes for "ObZen" (not to mention "Quaristice" :-)).
I had no idea as to the extent of Tomas Haake's artistic involvement in Meshuggah as a whole. Apparently he's written the entire lyrical content of the highly focused story of "ObZen" and conceived of its imagery as well; and in its imagery lies a multitude wrapped in a simple vision. That vision is of a cold and immense prison perimeter whose walls rise hopelessly high, whose angles are tyrannically pierced with overlooking sniper towers. The prison is shrouded in sickly and tiresome grey/blue overcast, and beyond its walls lie no sign of human life. In fact, the thick vacuum of silence conveyed by the freezing presence of the concrete architecture acts as a meaningful paradox against the antithetical thunder of the album in play. The bombastic, epiphanic, raging screams of the inner spirit is ultimately defenseless against the weight of the spiritually dead mass of outer environment that slowly and fully permeates its being.
How can one not relate the theme of "ObZen" to the incurable illness of Western spiritual stasis? Have we not reached a point that we all find Zen in the Obscene (as I interpret)? That we define ourselves by the pain we readily inflict? Or perhaps, as reviewer AllOverWith perceives (READ HIS REVIEW), have we not reached a point of spirit-numbing Zen as to be blinded in Oblivion to the fallacious realities we are fed on a daily basis? Have we not been conditioned to reject the alternative suggestions of our pineal glands as mere symbolic, vaporous experiences? Isn't it true that the world has lost its ability to interpret its collective dream of humanity fulfilled? I guess so, for in Haake's own words "the human dream" has been "incinerated, devoured, decieved."
In "ObZen," the bruising intensity of Meshuggah's terrific, brutal anvil bounce is definitively augmented by the terror of Haake's lyrics, a terror that lies in the immediate depiction of a person presently realizing his metamorphosis into a grotesquely robotized state. He simultaneously realizes his incarceration (the numbing of his assimilated will), which he allows with horrific, blissful submission, and finally sees the blunt image of his "evil splendor"--"no more ifs, no bias, no ambiguity...eyes dilated to grasp it all...every illusion of what we are fails...". Throughout the album he paints himself in nihilistic phrases. We are "obedient devices...puppets, finetuned submissive drones...gullibles" whose minds are "reviled [in] everlasting ignorance." We "atrophy," "succumb," "malfunction" under the imminence of a "terminating clockwork" of our "deletion" invited by our "mutinous" psyches. We accept our "lethargic" culture of death with "careless motion[s]" of slaughter by which we "flourish"; we are only half-awake to the reality of our existence, and thus fail to witness the tragedy of our "collapsing dreams." We reach the "state of perfection" in the title track, finding harmony in our "new belief system" defined by "filth...vomit...blood," ruled by the new God of "corruption, war and pain." Turn the page and a spy tower grunts threateningly, an echo throughout the inner darkness stuffed with eager, waiting bullets that have the silent power to "invisibly suppress" the wanderer in the midst of half-observant inmates. The "reality [of] terror," the "voracity of one single day" "asphyxiate[s]" us as the snake of our evil sheds its illusive, "smothering veil". The pineal gland, Descartes' "seat of the soul," awakens in the utter darkness of our horrible reality, confusing our distinction between past and present self, once blind and blissful, now aware and grotesque, refurbished with a "new set of eyes cleansed" by a "new belief." Our warped (Pravus) religion "arm[s] our mind[s]," now "toxic" and "flaunting," with "automatic...black, acidic bile" inspired into projection by our unquenchable "thirst" for depravity. Our new religion is realized: to "DISpirit," to feed off the lives of others, to raise "deceitful spawn" who will carry forth our cultural priorities into the blood-red roads of the future from which we will always look back to the "poisoned nails of history stung...," our destructive blades eternally "swung" in the image of our ancestors. There is finally no escape from "the essence of lies" in our "choreography refined" by "ignorance ever-amplified" in light of "questions unasked" by our "controllable herd," blind, robotized, "withering in toxicity," our only dumb goal but to "appease" the lords of the false comforts who feed us bloated portions of mind-lulling episodes of "discordant" shows. The pivotal vision is the Zen-vogued man, at once aware and stupefied, married to a prison balcony like a Greek sculpture devoted to Violent Illusion, dismembered by the death of his will and the reality of his sin.
Upon first listen, I experienced the premature disappointment that AllOverWith expressed as the failure to be thrilled by Meshuggah's code of "BA-Daaaaa, BA-Da-BEE-Da BA-DAAA" licks that have come to define their polyrhythmic Metal. But I took his advice (thanks!) and have now listened to "ObZen" three times while following along with Haake's lyrics in the booklet (I don't recommend doing this in moving traffic--yikes!); it has made all the difference. While the complex power of Meshuggah's music unquestionably stands tall on its own, the visual absorption of what Kidman is actually screaming TRULY adds an inescapable, virulent layer to the whole sonic experience. In fact, I found that the music comes fully alive, an unmistakably full moon of controlled hysteria. And isn't AllOverWith's suggestion a true, blatant metaphor of "ObZen"'s message as a whole? Is not the more you understand directly correlated to the clarity in which you see and hear?
Witness ObZen. When mankind breaches the prison walls of his falsely conceived realities, then the universe will really be born, emerged from the womb of galactic space to breathe its first real puff of conscious air, a bright new space speckled with our forms that have finally traded places with the inviting gap.
Obzen Poster
It is impossible to talk about experimental or avant-garde metal without mentioning this truly groundbreaking act: Meshuggah mix ultra-complicated rhythmic patterns with massive riffs and aggressive growls, combining Death Metal, Grindcore, Mathcore, Thrash and Progressive Metal to create their unique style. 'One of the ten most important hard and heavy bands', that's how the prestigious Rolling Stone Magazine describes Swedish sonic extremists Messhuggah.Hard Rock & Metal Music CDs
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