Destroy Erase Improve @ 30

Meshuggah's breakthrough and first masterpiece

First things first: Such Music is a monthly radio show hosted by Rihards Endriksons, journalist and artistic director of Latvia’s Skaņu Mežs festival. It’s devoted to new works of free improvised music, either previously unheard or created specifically for the show, and is produced in collaboration with Burning Ambulance. This month’s show includes the radio premiere of previously unheard duo improvisations by American-born multi-instrumentalist Nick Dunston and one of Latvia’s leading contemporary composers, Andris Dzenītis, performing under the moniker Woodpecker Öö. This recording session took place over two days in May, initiated by the SHAPE+ platform, which is co-funded by the EU and Pro Helvetia. Both musicians play electronic instruments, with Dunston also picking up the rebab. Listen on Mixcloud.

Colonialism, exotica, and Mama Killa: There’s a very interesting review of the Ava Mendoza/gabby fluke-mogul/Carolina Pérez album up on Beats Per Minute. “Instead of pretending to understand a deeply spiritual society that existed centuries ago, Mama Killa sonically examines these traditions through a personal lens, using bluesy, jazzy, psychedelic and metallic tropes that gnash and gnarl until the same level of spirituality spawns. Ultimately, Mama Killa is exotica music without the colonialism — it explores the complexities of a wide range of cultures that once reigned supreme over their land without undermining the spiritual significance of their traditional values. It sounds like a recording from a society that was never conquered but simply vanished, waiting for the precise moment to reappear and unleash its fury. This is a trailblazing, vengeful record.” Read the whole thing. (Buy Mama Killa here.)

Meshuggah are not an easy band to love. Their music is extremely heavy, discordant and often punishing to listen to. They rarely pursue the easy catharsis of a bluesy riff or a syncopated rhythm. Their guitar riffs sound like a hydraulic press slamming shut over and over again, and their drum patterns are hyper-intricate, but mechanistic, only occasionally syncing up with the guitars. The vocals are a hoarse, monotone bark utterly without melodic content.

All that said, once you’re attuned to their particular frequency, Meshuggah’s records, and especially their live shows, can be a blast. (I saw them in 2003, and frontman Jens Kidman was a genuinely entertaining stage presence. He did this thing where he swiveled his head back and forth, scanning the audience like a Terminator, and his between-song banter was a hilarious subversion of rock pieties; when the crowd started chanting “Me-shug-gah! Me-shug-gah!” he let them do it maybe three times, then barked, “Stop that nonsense!” in a thick Swedish accent that brooked no disobedience.) And honestly, their later work, while timbrally just as aggressive, is more rhythmically conventional — you can easily groove to lots of the songs on albums like Koloss, The Violent Sleep of Reason and Immutable.

But Destroy Erase Improve, which turned 30 earlier this year (original release date: May 12, 1995), was the work of a young and hungry Meshuggah, charging forward and daring others to try and keep up. Or…was it?

The first track, “Future Breed Machine”, begins gradually. Ambient sound, as of a warehouse or factory, slowly fades in, and with it a pulsing electronic tone like an alarm. At the 30-second mark, the guitars begin to chug as though summoned at the push of a button, and Tomas Haake’s drums beat out a repetitive barrage, and about a minute in, Lekman starts barking and roaring. They’re charging forward like a rocket-powered chariot made of chromed bones, something out of a Mad Max movie, when all of a sudden the illusion flickers with the introduction of… gang-shout backing vocals, the kind of thing you might hear on a Prong or Suicidal Tendencies or Biohazard album.

Those vocals show up on other tracks, too, like “Soul Burn”, which sounds more like Pantera circa Far Beyond Driven than any kind of futuristic cyber-metal. And the more you listen to Destroy Erase Improve, the more it sounds like a band working very much within the boundaries of modern post-thrash. Are they doing some things nobody else was doing at the time? Sure, but the percentage of real innovation in their music is still pretty subtle on this record.

Fredrik Thordendal’s guitar solos are a definite break with the majority of metal — they have more of the high-tech slipperiness of Allan Holdsworth or Jeff Beck than the whammy-bar screams of Eddie Van Halen and his descendants like Pantera’s Dimebag Darrell. The album’s second song, “Beneath”, begins and ends with some quite beautiful guitar interludes, but they’re bracketing what sounds like a groove metal song with the bass part from an entirely different groove metal song punched in. The instrumental “Acrid Placidity”, which kicks off the album’s second half, though, is pure Romantic beauty; Haake plays an almost jazzy rhythm on brushes as ocean waves hiss in the background. The tender guitar solo on closing track “Sublevels” almost feels like a nod to Frank Zappa’s “Watermelon In Easter Hay”.

Haake’s drumming throughout the album is extremely precise, of course, but the actual beats aren’t that different from what John Stanier of Helmet or Sim Cain of the Rollins Band were doing in the same era. And there’s almost always a steady, ticking hi-hat in the far right corner of the sonic field, providing a metronome for the listener — and, according to Haake, the guitarists.

Kidman’s seemingly monotone vocals gradually reveal themselves as quite expressive, albeit — again — within a particular tradition. On tracks like “Vanished” and “Transfixion”, it’s impossible not to hear echoes of Master Of Puppets-era James Hetfield in his howls of anguished rage. And again, the backing vocals, when they appear, are an unmistakable link to hardcore, the vehicle by which young men have been expressing their pain for decades.

Destroy Erase Improve is a great metal album. It built on what had come before and showed that new things were possible. But Meshuggah’s reputation as implacable, relentless, almost cruelly technical punishers, the band you can’t even mosh to because the riffs are so head-bustingly off-time… all that is far more true of albums like Chaosphere, Nothing, and Catch Thirtythr33 than of DEI. It’s a record that has gained an audience slowly over time, and is now justly revered, but at the time it was just a stepping stone to what was coming.

That’s it for today. Come back on Friday, when we’ll be talking about Portuguese saxophonist José Lencastre.