Periphery founder Misha Mansoor was once not really fond of Meshuggah.
In a new interview with Metal Hammer, Mansoor revealed that he did not understand why people were so obsessed with the djent band. Despite getting their main sound from the band, the Periphery guitarist thought they were ‘trash.’ He explained:
“I thought Meshuggah were absolute noise, just trash! I didn’t understand them until I spoke to a friend of mine, who was a very talented bassist, and asked, ‘Why’s everyone obsessed with Meshuggah?'”
The answer eventually became a ‘big shift’ in his life. He continued:
“He went, ‘Their thing is that everything they do is in 4/4, it just doesn’t sound like it.’ That’s when I was like, ‘Oh, Jesus! I think this may be a big shift in my life.’ And it was!”
Periphery’s Thoughts On Djent
Since their formation in 2005, Periphery has been highly compared to Meshuggah due to the sound resemblance, and other bands as well. Being one of the leading bands of djent, Mansoor is in a love-hate relationship with the genre. Jake Bowen, one of the three guitarists of the band, had some reasons to hate it. He said in an early interview:
“The whole djent thing… I would have embraced it a lot more had there been a bigger diversity in the music, but the problem with that whole thing was it was born on the internet. It really started with Meshuggah, and they had no idea that they were starting anything, they were doing what they do, and they’re an incredible band, and no one can touch them, or come close to sounding like them. But the actual bulk of the scene started on the internet.”
What bothered him about the genre was the artificiality and lack of originality in certain bands. He continued to explain how these bands achieve a sound that’s not original and unique:
“What I’ve noticed is that these bands that try to be ‘djent’ only take one or two flavours from the sound, and don’t get the fact that it’s way more dense than that. So you’ll only hear two types of things happening in a lot of mediocre djent bands’ music, and it’s not engaging enough and it sounds like everything else. I think that’s the mistake that these djent bands are making; they’re taking the groove aspect and the low-tuned riffing aspect, then putting some sort of clean guitar passage over it, then they write ten songs like that and call it an album. There’s a lot more to it than that.”
So it seems that even when one is in a djent band, they can still hate the genre.
You can listen to Periphery’s latest album, with an ironic title, ‘Periphery V: Djent Is Not A Genre,’ below.
