Review & photos by Andrew Bansal
June 6th 2014, The Wiltern, Los Angeles CA: Having stood strong as the pillars and innovators of all things extreme for the past 25 years, Swedish heavy metal titans Meshuggah are out to celebrate this 25th anniversary milestone with a two-week North American tour of selected markets and festival appearances, along with North Carolina prog luminaries Between The Buried And Me as sole support act, and began this trek last night with a highly anticipated and eagerly awaited show at the Wiltern Theatre in downtown Los Angeles.
Several hours before it started, the show was close to a sellout, and the fanfare surrounding the event was evident upon first sight of the long line of ticket holders waiting on the sidewalk outside the Wiltern. The excitement was decidedly palpable, as the doors opened promptly at 7 PM and within no time, all sections of the general admission floor and the balcony were packed, with people trying to get the best possible vantage point for the show. As everyone waited for the start, the place was abuzz with expectation of a special evening.
At 8 PM, the lights went out, the projection screen displaying advertisements was lifted, and the five members of Between The Buried And Me took their positions to deliver 60 minutes of highly intense and diverse progressive music. The sheer range of musicianship they incorporate in every single composition of theirs is greater than what most bands are able to do with their entire catalog of music, and as they began their set with the 14-minute epic masterpiece ‘White Walls’ with attendees in the frontmost GA pit completely losing their minds, I was instantly reminded of the fact that it was on this very stage that I was first introduced to the talents of this band nearly six years ago when they served as the opening act for Children Of Bodom and The Black Dahlia Murder. They’ve undoubtedly come a long way since then, in terms of their musical journey, stature and fan-following, and one cannot imagine a better, more ideal support act for this special Meshuggah tour. This five-song BTBAM set represented their three latest full-length albums namely ‘Parallax II’, ‘The Great Misdirect’ and ‘Colors’, delivered by five musicians at the peak of their powers as performers and augmented by a fitting light show, and besides White Walls, ‘Lay Your Ghost To Rest’ was a real highlight of the set. In all honesty though, sound-wise this was a far-from-ideal setting for a band of their calibre and sonic repertoire, as the mid-range was very much lacking in the mix. But nonetheless, every time I see this band, the more convinced I get of my own conjecture that Between The Buried And Me is the best thing North Carolina has ever given and will ever give to this planet.
Between The Buried And Me links:
BetweenTheBuriedAndMe.com
facebook.com/BTBAMofficial
twitter.com/BTBAMofficial
instagram.com/BTBAMofficial
Set List:
01. White Walls
02. Telos
03. Ants Of The Sky
04. Lay Your Ghosts to Rest
05. Fossil Genera – A Feed From Cloud Mountain
As everyone recovered from that face-melting Bee Tee Bam performance, time flew and before we knew it, the lights went out again and the moment had arrived for Meshuggah to grace this stage. Accompanied by an insane onslaught of flickering strobe lights that washed this entire audience and everything in its path, Meshuggah began their 90-minute set by rolling back the years and bringing forth ‘Future Breed Machine’, the opening tune on the 1995 album ‘Destroy Erase Improve’. They then went on to present selections from their 7-album, 25-year catalog in a very comprehensive and retrospective set and had this gathering of fans bouncing throughout its entirety, as there was no such thing here as a dull moment.
While the set started out all guns blazing with an array of Meshuggah’s deadliest compositions, it settled down after a short while to present the entire range of the band’s musical variations and progressive elements, even as the heaviness still flowed in plentiful amounts, and created a wholesome listening experience for the audience. To go with the unmistakably stellar musicianship, this Meshuggah performance was also equipped with a fantastic light show, wherein the flickering and patterns were in perfect synchronicity with the progression of the guitar riffs and musical segments, while the colors fittingly represented the varying expressions that were portrayed by the music. There was no light on the band members themselves though, as they appeared in the form of silhouettes for the whole set which allowed the combination of the music and the lighting patterns to truly occupy the foreground. It was clear that a lot of thought and effort had gone into formulating and executing this light show, and the result was an overwhelming success, turning out to be the most intelligent light show ever seen for a heavy metal band.
Strangely enough, even though they’ve played in Los Angeles (and in my home country India) quite a few times in the recent past, this was my first time seeing Meshuggah live, and it must be said, despite all the attention they get for the so-called complexity in their music and for being touted as the perpetrators of ‘djent’, I found them to be one of the easiest bands to head-bang to, simply because the heaviness never leaves the music and when it’s not the guitar riff, it’s the bass line or the drum beat that keeps the neck muscles moving. The Swedish masters of the heavy put on quite a show here, and for first-timers in the audience like myself, this was a beyond perfect introduction to the live Meshuggah experience. By attending this show and seeing Meshuggah for the first time here, I feels like I’ve moved one step closer to making my life complete.
On the other hand, the response from longtime Meshuggah fans was excellent and justified the level of the performance, but one truly bothersome aspect was the flaunting of the old-fashioned concertgoer’s nightmare, the iPad. As if modern giant smartphones weren’t bad enough, people are now bringing iPads into shows and holding them up to take photos, with absolutely no regard for the poor fellow attendees directly behind them. I really do hope someone from the venue is reading this. Please, for the love of God, Satan, music, or whatever it is that you worship, ban iPads from shows with immediate effect.
The lack of mid-range in the venue’s sound didn’t negatively affect Meshuggah nearly as much as it did Between The Buried And Me, but that’s also one thing I realized about this venue during this show more than I ever did here before, perhaps because for bands and music of this nature the sonic aspect requires finer attention to detail and a better balance in the mix and specially during BTBAM’s set whom I had seen several times before because of which I knew what the desirable sound quality needed to be, the sound mix’s shortcomings were very much noticeable to me. But despite that, the Wiltern certainly served as an appropriate stage for the light show that Meshuggah brought for this gig, and it might have been one of the main reasons they chose it as the LA venue for the tour.
Overall, Meshuggah’s 25th anniversary performance obliterated the Wiltern and its capacity audience and vindicated the band’s stature as stalwarts of all things heavy.
Check out a gallery of 28 Meshuggah and Between The Buried And Me photos from the show below, or view it here if you’re on a non-Flash device:
Meshuggah links:
Meshuggah.net
facebook.com/Meshuggah
twitter.com/Meshuggah
Set List:
01. Future Breed Machine
02. obZen
03. The Hurt That Finds You First
04. Do Not Look Down
05. Cadaverous Mastication
06. Greed
07. Gods Of Rapture
08. Neurotica
09. New Millennium Cyanide Christ
10. Break Those Bones Whose Sinews Gave It Motion
11. Bleed
12. Demiurge
13. Straws Pulled At Random
Encore:
Mind’s Mirrors
14. In Death – Is Life
15. In Death – Is Death
Remaining Tour Dates:
06/07/14 The Regency Ballroom – San Francisco, CA
06/09/14 Ogden Theater – Denver, CO
06/11/14 House of Blues – Dallas, TX
06/13/14 Bonnaroo Music Festival – Manchester, TN
06/14/14 Pop’s – Sauget, IL
06/15/14 Vic Theatre – Chicago, IL
06/17/14 The Fillmore – Silver Spring, MD
06/18/18 House of Blues – Boston, MA
06/19/14 Sound Academy – Toronto, ON – CANADA
06/20/14 Amnesia Rock Fest – Montebello, QC – CANADA
06/21/14 Best Buy Theater – New York, NY
The Wiltern links:
Wiltern.com
facebook.com/Wiltern
twitter.com/Wiltern
instagram.com/TheWiltern