Album Review: Meshuggah – Destroy Erase Improve [Reissue]
Reviewed by Dan Barnes
Sweden’s master of musical mayhem and scientists of sonic chaos, Meshuggah, celebrate milestones for two of their most important works: Catch Thirty-Three, perhaps the band’s most divisive album, and the sophomore Destroy Erase Improve, when Meshuggah became the Meshuggah we know today, were give new remasters and polishes in honour of their respective twentieth and thirtieth anniversaries last year. Catch Thirty-Three will be covered elsewhere, but in this piece I’m focusing on that second album from 1995, after which extreme music would never be quite the same.
Cast your mind back to the early nineties and the release of Meshuggah’s debut, Contradictions Collapse; while having some moments of eccentricity, this 1991 record was predominantly a thrash metal album, which incorporated other elements, such as industrial drums and it is the only one of the band’s albums to feature the rhythm guitar of Jens Kidman. But there was enough, in tracks like Internal Evidence and Choirs of Devastation, to suggest there was more than Metallica cloning going on here.
Spool forward to 1995 and the release of second full length, Destroy Erase Improve, which ejected the fat, chugging riffs and Hetfield snarls, in favour of a sharp, machine-like precision, dissonant technicality and progressive extremity, which would mark their path going forward.
From the opening moments of the classic Future Breed Machine it’s obvious that things have shifted since 1991. Tomas Haake’s drums pound with a mechanised power, the unrelenting guitars of Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström crush and mesmerise in equal measure, and Jens’ vocals are bile-spat and at times inhuman. This is the point that Meshuggah make good on the promises of None’s Gods of Rapture and stepped into a brave new world.
Demo versions of Vanished, Inside What’s Within Behind and Suffer in Truth appeared on the Selfcaged EP about a month before the album hit the shelves, with Vanished embracing a mid-track progressive moment amid its own chaos; Inside… is built around an edgy groove and spiralling guitar lines, while Suffer in Truth has a still-impressive crushing weight throughout.
Speaking back to the time when Destroy Erase Improve was first issued, one should remember how the landscape of Metal looked at that time: we were just free of the Grunge-era, bands like Pantera and Fear Factory were being hailed as the future, and the band seen as the bridge between the old and the new, Sepultura, were about the unleash the Nu blueprint that was Roots. The old guard were at something of a nadir, Bruce had left Maiden, Rob had gone from Priest, Metallica were experimenting with Load and Reload, and Ozzy was still to make a post-retirement comeback.
‘Twas a desperate time, as you can imagine/ recall, but nature abhors a vacuum and Meshuggah’s unconventional approach to songwriting and production was just the sort of thing the underground needed to survive.
Both Beneath and Soul Burn include groove in their raging aesthetic, and Transfixion is entangled in the kind of polyrhythms that would characterise the band’s sound for decades; Terminal Illusions still manages to maintain some of Contradictions’ thrash elements, yet it is the wistful instrumental, Acrid Placidity, that shocks with its quiet, sombre mood.
Closing track, Sublevels, brings everything together in a singularity: hauntingly modernistic riffs, cold and clinical, rub shoulders with the more traditionally progressive, accentuating both by their placement side-by-side.
Destroy Erase Improve is widely considered one of the defining records of its decade and a high watermark for extreme metal in general. The seeds were sown here for Meshuggah’s brutal percussion and staccato riffs which went on to define the entire genre of Djent. Rolling Stone magazine even listed it in their Top 50 Greatest Prog Rock Albums of All Time and in their Top 100 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. To this day, Future Breed Machine is still heavily featured in the band’s live sets, with Soul Burn and Suffer in Truth getting the occasional airing.
In all honesty, I love Meshuggah, but if you’re one of those folks who think they too cold and angular, maybe give Destroy Erase Improve a chance, and start to uncover the imperious majesty of their approach to extremity.
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