Reception
| Professional ratings | |
|---|---|
| Aggregate scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Metacritic | 83/100 |
| Review scores | |
| Source | Rating |
| Allmusic | |
| Alternative Press | |
| The Aquarian | A+ |
| The A.V. Club | A |
| Blabbermouth.net | |
| Exclaim! | favorable |
| IGN | |
| Zero Tolerance Magazine | 5.5/6.0 |
The album was well received by critics. Metacritic gave a score of 83 out of 100 based on 6 reviews, indicating "universal acclaim".
The album was praised for its consistency and how the band was claimed to continue their musical evolution, with Nick Terry from Decibel saying, "Three years on, and we have a new reference point to chart Meshuggah's musical evolution. And yeah, things are evolving nicely".
The album was also praised for the band revisiting their early thrash metal-oriented approach on tracks like "Combustion" and "Bleed" while still maintaining the experimentalism found on their last few albums. John Norby from Zero Tolerance Magazine described it as "The best of modern-Meshuggah meets the best of older-Meshuggah."
Thom Jurek, in his review of the album on Allmusic, called obZen "sheer attack metal, played by a band that has run from simplicity to excess and incorporated them both into a record that is on a level with anything else they've done, even if not all the elements marry perfectly yet".
Magazines such as Terrorizer, Decibel, Revolver and Metal Hammer named the album in their 2008 year's end list. Meshuggah was nominated for a Swedish Grammy for obZen in the category of Hard Rock but lost to In Flames.
Read more about this topic: Ob Zen
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