Every so often, something about a music project piques my curiosity enough that I feel compelled to write about it. As a long-time music lover, I find myself very interested in between 30 and 50 albums a year and write about one or two. This is one of those instances.
Let's get the obvious out of the way quickly. Koloss is the seventh full-length studio album from Swedish prog-metal act Meshuggah, released March 26 in North America. Meshuggah's trademark down-tuned eight-string guitars, intricate songwriting and aggressive vocals return for Koloss's entirety. Boasting 10 tracks and clocking in at just under an hour, Koloss is in every way the colossus it claims to be. It explores themes of the erosion of privacy in everyday life; a large, imposing force on the public; and so on. Fortunately, Meshuggah have opted to stick with what they do best and expand on it, rather than take a lot of the big risks that have made music fans grimace at so many other bands in the past. Remember Puff Daddy and Jimmy Page ruining Led Zeppelin's "Kashmir" and turning it into "Come With Me" for 1998's Godzilla soundtrack? Yeah, I wish I didn't either.
Recently, Meshuggah has especially excelled in bringing together an entire album as a whole project. Their release Catch Thirty-Three featured 13 tracks that were one continuous suite. Its companion release, I, is the opposite - one 22-minute song that sounds like a whole album. Koloss rises to this occasion as well - though the tracks are clearly separate, and no leitmotifs or ostinatos appear to unify them, one full listen to the album draws the listener in to the idea that Koloss is a jigsaw puzzle and each track is a piece.
What first raised my eyebrow about Koloss is its digital artwork. Created beautifully by Keerych Luminokaya, the brown-and-black-tinged cover featured above is just one part of the overwhelming mural on the back of the 15-panel foldout liner notes accompanying the copy of Koloss that arrived in my mailbox on Wednesday. Luminokaya calls this piece "Gateman." Though some art critics and cynics may compare Luminokaya's high-detail digital artwork to that of Alex Grey or even H.R. Giger, Luminokaya's detail and style clearly make his mark as a unique and priceless visual artist. It's so visually stunning I had to order the vinyl just to see it larger. There are hundreds - if not thousands - of waves of textures and individual lines that constitute the massive "Gateman." Out of pure coincidence, I spent one complete listen of Koloss just looking at Luminokaya's artwork on the front and back of the booklet. As I read the lyrics and pored over Gateman's faces, vectors and triangle fractals, I started to realize not only how well its intricacies and overwhelming presence fit the sound of the album - even the heavy brown color palette matches Koloss's no-frills sound production - but that the two were inseparable.
Sure, it's easy to marry the massive, dark and intimate sound of their 2008 album Obzen to its polarizing artwork - which features a naked three-armed meditator with no body hair, arms dripping blood, sitting on a cement block...but Koloss provides this audiovisual onslaught on a level that makes it simply impossible to disassociate one from the other. The aforementioned triangle fractals adorning Gateman's background remind me of many of Koloss's guitar riffs, in 3/4 time and progressing from simple to labyrinthine - the main riff of "Do Not Look Down" comes to mind specifically, as does the overall structure of "Behind the Sun." The sheer weight of the artwork is a perfect representation of Meshuggah's larger-than-life sound, the latter largely provided by drummer Tomas Haake. The intimidating malevolence represented by the dozens of snakes and regal pose of the Gateman is reminiscent of Jens Kidman's brutal vocals and the pop-free metal riffs of guitarists Fredrik Thordendal and Marten Hagstrom and bassist Dick Lovgren. The level of detail in the piece conjures up the guitar-pick maelstrom of Koloss's faster thrash-influenced tracks like "The Demon's Name is Surveillance."
Meshuggah's Koloss and Keerych Luminokaya's Gateman are each such labor-intensive works alone that they deserve their respective lives and places in 2012's creative landscape, not to mention a king's ransom of kudos and respect from music and art lovers. In fact, I have no doubt that Koloss will be one of my favorite albums of the year, metal or otherwise, and I've been made a lifelong fan of Luminokaya's artwork. When working together, though, they become more than the sum of their parts, making 1 + 1 = 3. This is the musical equivalent of chocolate and peanut butter, if chocolate and peanut butter could kick you in the nuts and shove you in a coffin. I don't rate albums I review, but I will pay this pairing the highest compliment in which I believe - it is masterful. These are two distinct artists who have mastered their crafts and taken it to unexplored heights. If you don't at least give them a chance, you're missing out on one of the great collaborations of the year.
