FROM THE CRYPTS - CELEBRATING PAST ALBUM RELEASES in the HISTORY of HARD ROCK & HEAVY METAL…
Today we look back at Meshuggah’s groundbreaking 1998 album Chaosphere, which saw the band shift heavily into the more Groove-oriented sound that would come to define them. The album also saw them dive deep into Progressive territory with songs that seemed quite simplistic, but after scratching the surface, were quite the opposite. Chaosphere was strongly influential in the later development of what is now known as the “Djent” movement.
Fredrik Thordendal is considered the originator of the Djent technique. However, the band did not coin the term itself; the Djent scene developed from an online community of bedroom musicians, including Misha Mansoor, whose success with Periphery brought Djent "from the virtual world into the real one". In a 2018 interview by Rauta, Meshuggah guitarist Mårten Hagström jokingly apologized for the band's role in creating the Djent genre. On how the name "Djent" originated he explained, "It was our lead guitar player, Fredrik, being drunk back in the day, talking to one of our old-school fans, trying to explain what type of guitar tone we were always trying to get, and he was desperately trying to say: 'We want that 'dj—' 'dj—,' 'dj—,' 'dj—.' And that guy was, like, 'What's he saying? Is that a Swedish word? Must be. Sounds like dj_, maybe 'Djent'? Maybe something like that."
Meshuggah released their seminal, third full-length studio album Chaosphere in Europe via Nuclear Blast on October 29, 1998. It was later released in the US on November 9, 1998, also by Nuclear Blast. It is the only studio album to feature bassist Gustaf Hielm.
Chaosphere's sound shows the band toning down some of the Thrash style of their previous releases in favor of the technical, polyrhythmic, groove-oriented sound they would continue to explore on subsequent albums. A video was made for New Millennium Cyanide Christ.
Background:
In May 1998, Meshuggah announced the title of their next album, Chaosphere, and recording was done throughout May and June. Immediately after recording the album, Meshuggah went on a short US tour, and the album was released later in November 1998. Chaosphere's sound is an almost complete departure from the Thrash Metal style of the band's previous releases. Shortly after the release, Meshuggah toured Scandinavia with Entombed.
In an interview for FaceCulture, vocalist Jens Kidman explained that Meshuggah went into writing Chaosphere with a singular purpose: "I think the thought we had was to make kind of a chaotic album”, "and it is kind of is chaotic."
Six Things You Didn’t Know About Chaosphere:
1. Meshuggah made Chaosphere quickly — at least by their standards; Having spent more than two years composing 1995's Destroy Erase Improve, Meshuggah were under pressure to deliver its full-length follow-up three years later, so they banged the whole thing out — writing and recording — in just three months, according to then-bassist Gustaf Hielm, who would split with the band in 2001. "It was intense," vocalist Jens Kidman recalled of the album-making process. "Every day, morning to night. The whole record is a reflection of how everything was made. Everything was new. We hadn't even played any of the songs all the way through before we went into the studio. Except one song, Sane — that was the only song we played."
"I think as far as the aggression, this intense style that we tried to incorporate in this album has reached the top," guitarist Mårten Hagström told Ink19; "I don't think we can do a more intense and in your face album as this one. Destroy Erase Improve was an experiment in dynamics and aggression. Chaosphere was like the punk-out album, you know, like just way out there."
2. Meshuggah were pressed for time in part because of one band member's solo project; The creation of Chaosphere was delayed while guitarist Fredrik Thordendal finished his experimental Jazz/Fusion/Metal album Sol Niger Within. "Fredrik's solo album took about a year and a half," said Hielm. "(Since) he was working on his solo album we didn't have any old riffs kicking around. We ditched a few songs because we weren't satisfied with them yet, but Nuclear Blast was on our backs to release something." Would the band have spent more time fine-tuning things if left to their own schedule? "Yes, we are actually quite lazy," the bassist admitted.
3. Chaosphere was the first album for which the band members wrote their parts at home, instead of jamming together in-person; For years, the members of Meshuggah lived close together in Umeå, Sweden, which was about 373 miles from their management in Stockholm. In 1997, they moved closer to their management's offices. In the process, however, the musicians ended up living further apart from one another. Instead of coordinating their schedules and meeting at a central location to write together, they composed separately. "We have computers and home studios, and then we send more or less finished songs to each other in MP3 files", Hielm told Lollipop "It's cool because we can sit at home and evaluate the songs without the pressure. You can play around with the riffs and add your own ideas as they come up instead of being limited to what happens in the rehearsal room." It's a way of working that the group has pursued ever since.
4. New Millennium Cyanide Christ was inspired by suicide cults like Jim Jones' Peoples Temple; One of the most popular tracks on Chaosphere, New Millennium Cyanide Christ, is about the darkness and danger that can arise when a charismatic despot develops a legion of fanatic followers. "That's more of a dystopian take on a sectistic or extremist kind of cult vibe," Haake told Songfacts. "The inspiration came from suicide cults and stuff like that where you have one leader that can take hundreds of people and just brainwash them and make them think he's Christ or the savior."
5. The spoken-word parts on Explicit Machinery of Torture are delivered by drummer Tomas Haake, not singer Jens Kidman; Kidman may be the body-banging lead singer of Meshuggah, but Haake writes all the group's lyrics. That being the case, it makes some sense that he has recorded all of the band's spoken-word passages. "I guess, basically, I'm more familiar with the English language so it's easier for me because when you speak, it's a whole different technique," the drummer told metal-temple.com. "See, I couldn't sing, but I could do this. Jens is a great singer, but not necessarily if you're speaking like that. It's kind of not the way he's used to doing things."
6. Chaosphere's especially chaotic "hidden" conclusion features four songs on top of each other;
Fifteen-and-a-half–minute album closer Elastic fades out in feedback before erupting again in a "hidden part" of what sounds like blasting, random white noise. In fact, its four songs being played back at the same time. "At the end of Elastic, we were supposed to have a fade-out of the song during the strange part, but Fredrik left his guitar on and it started to feedback in an old ADA delay, feedbacking internally, so when we started to mix the album, we decided to leave it in," Hielm explained. "At the end of the album, we wanted to end with some kind of statement, so we put four songs on top of each other. We had fun when we did it, but I don't think a lot of people find it fun to listen to. I think it's a combination of Concatenation, The Mouth Licking What You've Bled, New Millennium Cyanide Christ and some other song."
The results are almost absurdly chaotic, and yet the overlay did reveal some surprising synchronicity — according to Hielm, the guitar solos in all four songs start at the same time. Asked what that might mean, the bassist self-deprecatingly dismissed any greater import to the coincidence: "It means we wrote the same fucking song four times," he concluded.
More Release Info:
The Japanese version of the album contains a bonus song, titled Unanything, as track 9. This song was also included on the promotional card-sleeve CD as track 6. As explained in Six Things You Didn't Know, on both this and the standard album release, after Elastic there is a period of silence then an unlisted and unindexed track where four of the album's songs are played at once, with volume changes making each song somewhat dominant and recognisable in the mix at different times.
The Reloaded re-release features four of the five tracks from The True Human Design EP.
Critical Reception:
In a review for AllMusic, Mike DaRonco stated;
“When the likes of Cannibal Corpse and Obituary came about and pleased every butt-rocking wannabe Satanist out there, a term such as "intellectual death metal" was only thought of as just an oxymoron. That was before Meshuggah came out and outsmarted all these suburban burnouts. Sure Chaosphere flaunts the flaming guitar solo every now and then, and don't forget their tendency of trying to come across as all dark and evil. But what Meshuggah have over all the carbon copy death metal acts out there is that they focus primarily on knowing how to play their instruments and segue tempo changes rather than trying to outspeed and outgrowl everybody. Seriously, each song will have one guessing on which direction the band is going to take next. Who would have thought that there would be a band that could respark a genre that was long thought overdone after the second Napalm Death record?”
Note: The reviews shared here are for historical reference. The views and opinions expressed within are not always supported (in full or in part) by Into the Wells. — E.N. Wells
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