By Jase Walker
One of the last couple of gigs I’ll see this month in the lead up to the festival season is a band that is almost single-handedly responsible for inspiring thousands of guitarists – Meshuggah.
Suffice to say this will be a gathering of the more colourful metalheads with an insatiable thirst for odd time signatures and just outright balls to the wall heavy riffs. Zeal & Ardor almost didn’t make it due to illness and had to drop out of some of the earlier dates but they’re back and ready to tear Manchester a new one with their clash of gospel and blackened metal, glad to have them along!
With a new album which dropped earlier this year, these particular shows are no doubt going to be extremely heavy on the newer material. With an hour long set time, we’re going to get a hell of a lot out of this, crazy long set time for a support act! Admittedly the sound so far seems to be leaning a bit heavy towards the low end and the reverberation of such a large venue isn’t really doing it any favours right now. Thankfully the sound issues only seemed to be around for a small amount of the start of the set before getting sorted and sounds much better now!
So far with the set, they’re wasting no time in blasting through the songs, all tinged with afro-gospel and blues elements. Definitely an extremely unique band on the circuit right now with their particular choice of genre fusion and they do a fantastic job of making it work jumping back and forth between gospel and face melting blackened metal riffage. One thing to note as well about the members on stage is that in addition to the usual guitars, drums, bass, and singer lineup, there’s also two ‘supporting’ singers very much at the forefront. I say that in quotes because saying they’re just in support is somewhat downplaying the active role they have in the stage performance.
On the whole, Zeal & Ardor are smashing at what they do, it’s not really my thing but I’ve seen them a few times now and it’s without a doubt the best performance they’ve put on so far. I don’t doubt for a second that they’ll be headlining shows of this size themselves before long!
In between the bands, the interval music is… interesting. They’re playing a selection of well-known metal bangers, but all instrumental chiptune/8-bit versions and letting the audience fill in the vocals for it, such as Pantera’s ‘Walk’ or System of a down’s ‘Chop Suey’.
It’s only a few minutes to go before Meshuggah and the venue has gone from “busy” to “absolutely heaving” in the space of about ten minutes.
The stage goes dark and the crowd screams, eventually falling to a chorus chant of “Meshuggah! Meshuggah!” Time for the main event! I’ve positioned myself just in front of the sound desk, which is hopefully a wise decision because I know this crowd is going to go berserk the moment the first riff hits.
I’ve no idea how they’re doing this lighting but it’s one of the brightest shows I’ve ever seen at Academy 1 and somehow I can barely make out the band members as anything other than shadows. The grooves are relentless, thunderous and shaking the air from every direction. Meshuggah are making their presence felt here in Manchester’s premier Academy venue and the crowd is lapping it up. I can see a few rows down from me the constant sea of movement, waving hands and bouncing of heads that can barely keep in time with the ever-changing rhythms.
The light show on the stage is incredible too, every possible colour permutation is on show here, all finely tuned to the bands playing. It’s mind-blowing trying to think how Meshuggah can stay in time so well, easily the tightest live band you’ll ever see. The whole performance is a full on audio/visual assault, every single nut and bolt of it is fine tuned.
It’s little wonder that Meshuggah are held in high regard, even by many people who don’t really listen to them regularly. The sort of stuff they create is, for tech metal types anyway, widely regarded as some of the hardest stuff you can play. You only need to look at the sheer number of people on YouTube doing covers of ‘Bleed’ or ‘Demiurge’ to see the pedigree they carry.
Further along in the set, some ominous looking flags have been raised up on the stage that I don’t remember seeing earlier on! I’m trying to get an eye on them to figure out what they’re meant to be since it looks halfway between HR Giger art and Greek pillars. The onslaught continues, Meshuggah making the most of their set cramming as much in as they can while only sparingly chatting to the audience briefly. Admittedly it’s not the most outright rowdy crowd I’ve seen here but I wonder if that’s down to some of the audience being more concerned with trying to analyze what they’re playing.
Considering Meshuggah are more than halfway through this tour and still on absolute top form, this is a fantastic sign for the remaining dates. They’ve absolutely smashed it here. I feel the crowd could have responded a bit better but that’s how it is sometimes! It’s easy to see how Meshuggah kick-started a movement with what they’re doing, and they’ve shown everyone how it’s done here. I’m chuffed that I got to come and see more or less the reason why many of my favourite bands exist today.
- The tour continues at the Olympia in Dublin tomorrow (Wednesday 1 June), before finishing at the Royal Albert Hall on Friday (3 June).
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