Meshuggah – Catch
Thirtythree
(Nuclear Blast,
2005)
Buy the album here
Catch Thirtythree is a mind-numbing, obstinate, confusing
brute. It’s wilfully bleak, esoteric, repetitive,
violent, and it has no concern for your sanity or wellbeing. Choosing to listen to Catch Thirtythree is like choosing to eat granite for dinner, washing
it down with acid, then lying back on a bed of nails to experience the pain in
your gut. Everybody knows you don’t
digest well lying down. Possibly due to
the burning darkness inside me, this album instantly jumped inside my brain and
has refused to leave ever since. This
appears to be the case for many others as well.
Meshuggah’s popularity/ubiquity (it’s hard to tell) in metal steadily
grew with this and next record, Obzen. Trying to understand why is the purpose of this
blog post.
Ostensibly
set out as a single suite concept album, the track names that make up the whole
piece are little more than signposts along this bizarre journey. If a listener approaches this album expecting
hooks, choruses, or even “songs”, they may very well quit before the end. Meshuggah give you the bare minimum with
which to hold on, pulling out long passages of repetitive “djent” guitar
rhythms or eerie atmospheric tracks in between moments of pummelling heaviness
which are relieving in their relative catchiness. The drums are all programmed from samples of
Tomas Haake’s actual drumming, and it lends the whole album a punishingly
robotic feel. This is balanced by the
sheer demonic power of Jens Kidman’s death growl which is varied, dynamic, and
impassioned. The earth-shattering bass
sound on this album doesn’t make it a warmer experience, but definitely
contributes to the intimidating size of the sound. All told, Meshuggah have better albums with
better songs on them.
But
there is something perspective-altering about the determined and brutal
delivery of this concept. There is a
line that can be drawn from the first note through the entire piece to its
culmination, around which Meshuggah have created never-ending variations on a
theme. The music never strays from its
ultimate mission to surreptitiously pull the listener in to this unforgiving
world of paradoxes, so that as the final act of this piece (represented by “Shed”,
“Personae Non Gratae”, “Dehumanization”, and “Sum”) plays we are no longer
aware of how we got here or why we stayed.
Nothing is what it seems: track beginnings and ends are mostly
indistinguishable; dynamics seem to build to imminent catharsis before being
discarded unfulfilled; Jens Kidman’s anger is more existential struggle than
angst or rebellion; even the drums don’t “exist”.
Repeated
rhythms cast a spell over your mind, pulling you deeper than you could ever
expect to go with such unwelcoming music.
It’s like being in a darkened room with a green laser blasting right in
to your eye, yet you can’t look away, can’t even turn your head. Trying to draw out highlights from such an
experience is difficult, but the surging pace and riff of the first three
tracks, “Autonomy Lost”, “Imprint of the Un-Saved”, and “Disenchantment” are breath-taking, while the sickening breakdown feel of “The Paradoxical Spiral”, “Re-inanimate”,
and “Entrapment” is insanely addictive. The
monstrous sounds and robotic soliloquy of “Mind’s Mirrors” are the hinging
point of the whole record, before Meshuggah launch themselves head-first in to
the hellish explosion of “In Death – Is Life”.
The anticipation alone is enough to survive on, but the song itself is a
brilliant standalone track that would not be out of place on Chaosphere. The protracted hammering of “In Death – Is Death”
is a masterwork of controlled dynamics and perfectly sets up the more immediate
final act that I discussed above. But I
don’t think that “how good any of the songs is” has anything to do with why I
like this album so much. It’s about its
purity of vision. It’s about the fact
that Meshuggah do not care what you expect, or what the rules are. It’s about having something completely
new. Even if it is sick, disgusting, and
completely messed up.
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