Tomas Haake
External Combustion

by Michael Parillo
Photos by Micke Sandström

Metal, and its evolution, is all about the concept of more. More power. More darkness. More speed. More precision. More complexity. More, more, more.

    And this expansive genre, among the feistiest of musical beasts, doesn’t like to sit still; it needs to push ever onward. Let’s just say that if Metallica released its 1986 thrash masterpiece, Master Of Puppets, today—an album that was truly groundbreaking in its time—it would be greeted with reactions like, “Aw, how cute. They’re trying to play fast.”

    Metal isn’t shy about its demands on musicians. It’s almost like mixing athletics, which can be quantified and ranked using scores and stats, with art, which can’t; those who turn to the dark side of rock take measurable things like speed and rhythmic density and filter them through a subjective aesthetic sensibility. And in the best cases—with bands that don’t skimp on the creative part—out pops something that will have you alternately banging and scratching your head, as first you let the distortion rain over you and then you try to make sense of what the devil you’ve just heard.

    In terms of both finding more of everything that counts and supplying a feast for the ears and the mind, it’s tough to top Meshuggah. The Swedish quintet’s new album, ObZen, not only includes its most visceral music but is arguably one of the most brutally engrossing and sadistically satisfying metal LPs ever made. It’s absolutely jam packed with stunning writing and superhuman execution. The riffs played by guitarists Fredrik Thordendal and Mårten Hagström and bassist Dick Lövgren are so complex and meticulous they’d make Frank Zappa blush; the words, written by drummer Tomas Haake, sound like they’re ripping singer Jens Kidman’s throat out as they exit his mouth; and the drums…well, the song “Bleed” calls for such punishing 32nd-note blasts of double bass that Haake—no slouch on the kicks—spent six months preparing to record it.

    That’s the “more” we’re talking about. Meshuggah is standing on the shoulders of past metal and prog giants and then taking a big imaginative stomp into the future of extreme music. It’s conceivable that ObZen could have been sent back to us as a gift from the year 2018, but given its cutting-edge qualities, there’s no way it could have been created much earlier than right now.

    As for the thirty-six-year-old Haake, he surely didn’t mind shedding those “Bleed” parts so extensively, as Meshuggah’s previous album, 2005’s Catch Thirty-Three, was a single-track metal epic that contained not one bar of live drumming; all percussion was programmed, using state-of-the-art samples of Haake’s own Sonor kit. (The drummer initially helped prepare the samples for Toontrack’s Drumkit From Hell software.) It’s a remarkable achievement that fits in neatly with Meshuggah’s fondness for tossing curveballs at its audience—plus Haake contributed lyrics and artwork as usual—but now it was time to start whipping the sticks around again.

    Indeed, a sense of urgency is palpable on ObZen, Meshuggah’s sixth studio LP. Haake and company warm up with a few muted jabs of a spy-type theme for all of nine seconds before they reach back and punch you in the jaw over and over for the next fifty-three minutes. It’ll take a while before you know what hit you. The parts fly by fast and furious, clanging and kicking and mutating into ever more complicated versions of their original forms. Counting along becomes damn near impossible—yet Haake insists the entire album is in 4/4. Remember, the band’s name is the Yiddish word for crazy. And the shoe fits.

MD: Do you have practice techniques, like slowing things down, to help you learn Meshuggah’s complex material?

Tomas: It depends whether it’s stuff that I’ve written myself. With a lot of our music, whoever writes the song writes the drum parts as well. So I write maybe ten percent of the drum parts on a given album. On ObZen maybe I’ve written fifteen, twenty percent at the most. If one of the guitarists wrote the song and the drum parts, I usually do slow them down.

    Over the last bunch of years, we always write on the computer using Cubase. So if there’s a big movement over thirty-two bars, I can take two or four bars and cycle them, at whatever tempo I want. I have to do that for some stuff just to figure out what’s going on. But most of the time I can hear it by ear and I don’t have to slow it down. But especially with the ObZen album, I have to practice a lot to nail those parts, no doubt about it. By far this was the toughest album to learn and to practice.

MD: When others write your parts, do you often find yourself changing them?

Tomas: What I do is add fills, and the tiny hits here and there, because they don’t usually program a lot of fills. I also have a tendency to play the accents even more than how it’s written—I play a lot more with my left arm as far as syncopation and accents. And I play more cymbals with my left than they program. But apart from that I don’t really change the patterns unless one of the guys doesn’t know how to do the drums for a certain part. Then I’ll come in and help him write that one part of one track. There are seven or eight parts over the whole latest album where I did that.

MD: How long did you spend in the studio making ObZen?

Tomas: It took more or less six months for us to record the album. We changed a few riffs and a couple drum parts, but all in all the music was written beforehand. So it took us quite a long time to complete this album.

MD: Did you rehearse the songs as a band and then go in and play them?

Tomas: No, actually not. That’s one of those things that we want to change. Over the last few albums, we haven’t really been prepared to go into the studio, which means for this album I sat and rehearsed all the stuff listening to prerecorded guitars. Using Cubase I can play along with the drums, and once I know the stuff well enough I can turn off the drums and just play with the click track. And of course I can mute or un-mute the guitars and all the stuff as I go.

    I’ve just gotten used to playing by myself once I start recording. I actually don’t have anything except the click track when we start tracking the drums. I only hear me. [laughs] I could have guitars on, but they would be so low in comparison to the drums and the click that it doesn’t really make any sense. It’s kind of boring, as you can probably understand, but at the same time it allows me to really hear what I do. Of course, it does mean that I have to be prepared enough so I can actually hear or feel all of the other parts when I play.

There's more to this interview! Pick up the May issue of Modern Drummer at music stores, book stores, and newsstands everywhere!