Michael Mullenix
MESHUGGAH
w/ Cannibal Corpse
4/15/25 – ACL Live Moody Theater – Austin, TX
©Michael Mullenix
On April 15th, the ACL Live Moody Theater hosted one of the heaviest nights of music in its history, featuring Carcass, Cannibal Corpse, and Swedish extreme metal giants Meshuggah as the headliners. The venue, famous for hosting the Austin City Limits Live TV show and having flawless acoustics, gave Central Texas Metalheads the definitive experience of witnessing any of these bands.
Check out our concert photos from Carcass below:
Cannibal Corpse was the second band on, coming up to the front of the stage with a mission: Be the heaviest and most evil band the Moody Theater has ever hosted. From the first hissed note of “Scourge of Iron,” the crowd got the message, erupting into a mosh pit and turning the theater into a Hall of Carnage.
The stage show is bare knuckles, five musicians who helped pioneer a subgenre still sweating it out onstage and driving a crowd into a frenzy. Their set was a plethora of hits from different points in their career, with older fan favorites like “Hammer Smashed Face” pairing well with the newer additions to the set like “Summoned For Sacrifice” and “Inhumane Harvest.”
Check out our concert photos from Cannibal Corpse below:
Finally, the houselights dimmed once more, leading up to a long introduction as Meshuggah took the stage and came crashing down on the song “Broken Cog.” Meshuggah is both technical and unrelenting. The high-level buzz around this band surrounds their implementation of unique time signatures as well as the divergent song structure they employ.
Much more than fancy solos and fretboard noodling, this band delivers an entirely avant-garde way of thinking about how metal songs can be structured, with songs like “The Violent Sleep of Reason” and “Rational Gaze.” But if you were to wander into this show blind (figuratively speaking), you would see a band with 8-string guitars flanked by a light show while conducting a purely savage mosh pit.
It feels like Meshuggah’s unique alchemy scratches every metalhead’s itch, as both technical appreciators and moshers were treated to hits such as “Dancers To A Discordant System,” “Future Breed Machine,” and “God He Sees In Mirrors.” At the end, and even with the houselights coming up briefly, the band returned for one last time to the stage to deliver the masterful closers “Bleed” and “Demiurge,” closing the show on one more glorious note.
Check out our concert photos from Meshuggah below:
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