Meshuggah - obZen (Reivew: MattJ)

This has been coming for a while now, and I was very glad to see this album come up as Roshan's return album. I've only ever heard Bleed by Meshuggah and liked their very different riffs and the heaviness of the song in general, but I was worried whether they would fall in to the same trap that countless metal bands have in the past, especially technical metal bands - that almost all of their songs are the same and they become one long boring monotonus song of people wanking over their instruments. What I means is that so many of these metal bands completely lack any emotion or feeling in their music, one man armed with just an acoustic guitar can create much deeper and meaningful feelings in a listener that Cannbial Corpse ever could.

Now the question is: does Meshuggah fall in to this emotionless trap? I found the answer to be yes, but not as bad as it could have been. I feel like Meshuggah are very much showing off their technical ability, which is immense. But I don't think that Meshuggah are really trying to say anything else with their music apart from a display of the hardest-to-do vocals, with the hardest-to-do guitar, etc. I don't really have a problem with Meshuggah doing all of this instrumental masturbating though, as they clearly have a right to. The more I think about it the more I realise that this is music made by fans of technical metal for the technical metal audience and while I don't like it I can hardly slate them for not being arty or emotional enough.

I feel like I'm writing off a whole band just because of one album, when it could be that their other albums incorporate completely different styles and sounds. But seeing as this album is all I have to go with I can only compare them with other bands people label 'technical', like Tool, Gojira and Opeth. Compared to such bands, in terms of ability, I'd say they're one of the best I've ever heard but I'm not going to change how I listen to music for this band, because I don't want to rate them on their ability to play instruments.

I'm going to give them 2.5/5 because I genuinely enjoyed about half of the album, but on second listen I have to say I was not finding anything new and becoming a little bit bored.