Among the band's most recognizable qualities are lead guitar player Fredrik Thordendal's abrasive, chaotic and discordant solos, singer Jens Kidman's vocals, which resemble manic screams and shouts, the churning, dissonant rhythm guitars and the polymetric drum beats. In a typical Meshuggah song, drummer Tomas Haake plays two separate rhythms: a standard 4/4 beat with his hands and a completely different metrical subdivision with his feet. The rhythm guitars follow the bass drums, creating an awkward but pulsating rhythmic pattern to work as the basis of the song.
For example, the main riff of the song "New Millennium Cyanide Christ," from their 1998 album Chaosphere, follows the aforementioned blueprint. Haake beats a rather slow 4/4 rhythm with his hands, while the bass drums and guitars play a repetitive 23/16 rhythm pattern on top of it. As the subdivided pattern is repeated, the pattern's accents shift to different beats on each repetition. After repeating the 23/16 pattern five times, a shorter 13/16 pattern is played once. These patterns sum up to 128 16th notes which equals exactly 8 measures in 4/4 meter
ray:
