Label: Atomic Fire
Release date: April 1, 2022
Production: Meshuggah & Rickard Bengtsson
Album length: 66.43 min
Swedish heavyweights Meshuggah took even more time than usual to put this new album together. It’s no secret that Meshuggah need ages, since they’re serious perfectionists, and on top of that the band aren’t exactly spring chickens anymore, so fresh ideas don’t just fall out of the sky either.
It’s 2022, and Meshuggah are back with their ninth album. A band that was largely overlooked for the first 20 years of its career did a complete 180 in 2008 with the album ObZen. Not only did they become one of the most popular bands in the history of extreme metal, they also gave birth to the (sub)genre of djent. With their unique style, crushing power and massive production, Meshuggah inspired countless other bands. And through it all, they’ve stayed relevant. They haven’t gone soft like, say, Gojira; they’ve stayed true to their style, and the experimental elements are still there, but there are no longer the kind of detours you got before 2008, when the groundbreaking ObZen came out.
Over the last ten years, it seems Meshuggah have found their comfort zone, and Immutable confirms that very well. That still doesn’t mean the album has no surprises. Meshuggah remain (poly)rhythmic acrobats who put a huge emphasis on groove. Guitarist Fredrik Thordendal also returned for the recording, though this time he only contributed solos and wasn’t around for the actual writing.
The opener Broken Cog already proves that Meshuggah are still sharp at songwriting: it sounds minimalist at first, and after a calm start, with Jens Kidman’s vocals even closer to a whisper, the band hits hard and destructively. As an opener, Broken Cog doesn’t reach the heights of their previous album openers, but it signals well enough that Meshuggah won’t be backing down anytime soon. At the same time, the band once again shows they don’t stick to conventional structures, which brings out their more progressive side. Next comes The Abysmal Eye, the first track unveiled from Immutable, and it shows Meshuggah in the best possible light. The band delivers a rhythmically varied song with crafty twists, while keeping enough aggression and groove to make the whole thing more convincing. And speaking of the band’s rhythms, Meshuggah serve up Phantoms, which with its complexity will surely win over even those skeptical fans the record hadn’t convinced up to that point. Further proof that Meshuggah haven’t gone soft is the seriously heavy Ligature Marks, which is slower in nature. It comes across with a touch of sludge metal, which adds a bit more variety to the album.
Probably one of the more interesting tracks is the instrumental They Move Below, which starts out calm in the style of The Last Vigil from Koloss (2012), but builds up with heavy distortion and dynamic rhythms. Meshuggah then shift up a gear with Kaleidoscope and show an outstanding feel for groove. The short instrumental Black Cathedral has a black metal tinge, but evidently serves only as an intro to I Am That Thirst, which is yet another crushing track.
One of the most aggressive tracks on the album is Armies of the Preposterous, which somehow recalls the band’s more chaotic days in the nineties, though the chaos on their newer records seems more controlled, which has also made Meshuggah more bearable and listenable. The band closes the album with the “pleasant” instrumental Past Tense, which, thanks to its structure alone, feels pretty progressive even though it’s a calm piece.
Immutable is the longest record of the band’s career. On the odd track you even wonder whether it’s filler, but in the end it turns out Meshuggah have made another masterpiece, one that musicians and music critics will be dissecting for a long time.
With Immutable, Meshuggah confirm that the days of heavy experimentation are obviously behind them. After all, the band isn’t dewy-eyed young anymore, they’re all in their fifties, and it’s a question of time how much of a musical road Meshuggah even have left ahead of them. Thordendal’s absence from the writing process probably also helps explain why Meshuggah have become more “play-it-safe,” and overly wild excursions wouldn’t have paid off all that well here. So Immutable isn’t a follow-up to the experimental, psychedelic Catch 33, and the chaos is more controlled than on Chaosphere. It’s the logical result of the direction set out with ObZen, followed by the albums Koloss and The Violent Sleep of Reason.
You could fault the album for being too long, for being generic at times, for not being as daring as its predecessors. The criticism especially lands on Kidman’s monotonous vocals, but others see Kidman as a rhythmic instrument, and that’s part of what makes Meshuggah special. As for the playing itself, there’s nothing to complain about. Meshuggah are still surgically precise, and they’ve stayed rhythmically varied. The flirtation with jazz fusion is still there, and especially in Thordendal’s solos it’s more than obvious that the legendary jazz guitarist Allan Holdsworth is a hugely important inspiration. The most important member is still drummer Tomas Haake, whose rhythms and inventive polyrhythms are the cornerstone of Meshuggah. Of course, you can’t overlook guitarist Mårten Hagström and bassist Dick Lovgren either, who have been contributing plenty of ideas to the writing of the albums for some time now.
There’s one thing Meshuggah will undoubtedly never compromise on, and that’s simply the production. Immutable sounds massive like its predecessors. Even though it sounds modern and maybe even futuristic thanks to the brutal tone of the eight-string guitars, you have to admit that Meshuggah nailed the production job. As for how the sound has evolved over the years, we can borrow a line from Metal Hammer: “Meshuggah have simply become more Alien than Terminator.” That’s backed up by the exceptionally polished organic sound, but the fact is that Meshuggah are a band that spends quite a lot of time in the studio, and Thordendal even built his own, where he recorded his solos.
Immutable is a record that should satisfy the band’s fans. It may disappoint a few, but Meshuggah remain consistent and relevant to the more extreme side of metal. Meshuggah can definitely still surprise, just not to the extent they did twenty years ago.
8.5/10
Tracklist:
01. Broken Cog
02. The Abysmal Eye
03. Light the Shortening Fuse
04. Phantoms
05. Ligature Marks
06. God He Sees in Mirrors
07. They Move Below
08. Kaleidoscope
09. Black Cathedral
10. I Am That Thirst
11. The Faultless
12. Armies of the Preposterous
13. Past Tense
