Even though their new album 'Catch Thirty-Three' didn't excite me overwhelmingly, I quite liked a lot of its ideas so I grabbed a copy of 'Chaosphere', which I hear is Meshuggah's best album.
It's a lot more 'metal' than 'Catch Thirty-Three'; I wouldn't have done the mental double take I did when I heard one of their songs playing on the Axe Attack if they had picked a track off of this album. Having said that it's definitely still completely off the wall in the rhythm department. I looked up a tab for one of the songs that I thought I might take a stab at playing, and saw that it starts out in 23/16 time (personally I'd say it's in alternating bars of 10/16 and 13/16 time, but that's splitting hairs when it comes to sitting down and trying to play it).
While their trademark rhythms are no different, the format of the songs is a lot more accessible than on 'Catch Thirty-Three'. That is, more accessible if you like really heavy music. Each song is three to five minutes of full on thrash with deep growly vocals and squealy atonic guitar solos. Not as musically interesting as 'Catch Thirty-Three' but a lot more immediately, viscerally pleasing. The most unusual track is the last one, which starts out with five minutes of a normal song before slowing down into a deep drone for a few minutes with peculiar phase effects. Then it abruptly snaps back (the song is called 'Elastic') into a cut up, mashed together noise fest of all the previous tracks played together. It sounds fucking insane, but believe it or not, not a whole lot more insane than the rest of the album.
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