By Ben Richardson
Esteemed Guardian staffer Cheryl Eddy was kind enough to sacrifice a sentence of her Behemoth preview this Wednesday, Oct. 24, on the altar of French metal masterminds Gojira. Though the adjective she picked to describe them - “brutal” - is certainly apt, I wanted to delve a little deeper into the band’s Gallic brutality.
Gojira is the brainchild of two brothers from Bayonne: Joe and Mario Duplantier, a guitarist and a drummer who honed their formidable instrumental skills as children before recruiting a bassist and second guitarist to round out their band. Initially calling themselves Godzilla, they soon paid the inevitable price of, well, not coming up with a better band name, and switched over to the Japanese translation.
Describing Gojira’s music is tricky. The music definitely draws on the bludgeoning power of down-tuned death metal riffs, and it harnesses the speed of thrash metal picking, but it’s nigh impossible to call it “death” or “thrash” in good conscience. There’s also the complication of the band’s heavy prog influence, which manifests itself in Gojira’s off-kilter, abruptly curtailed riffs, strange time signatures, and majestic, epic interludes.
The band’s most recent album is titled From Mars to Sirius, which name-checks two massive interstellar bodies. In combination with the disc’s song titles, this suggests an unswerving commitment to heaviness. Track 6, “The Heaviest Matter in the Universe,” is an obvious example, but “Flying Whales,” “From the Sky,” “Where Dragons Fall,” and even “Ocean Planet” seem to suggest the presence of things that are, literally, really, really heavy.
This fixation on heaviness is certainly borne out figuratively in the band’s music, which centers around a distinctive take on the low-end chug that powers a good deal of modern metal. This take could be awkwardly described as “playing fast while also playing slow.” The technique requires the precise coordination of the guitarists’ picking hands and the drummer’s thundering feet, so that the bass drum is played in exactly the same hyper-fast rhythm as the guitars’ strumming pattern, in a flurry of precise 16th notes.
This is the fast part. The slow part is a little more nuanced. Unlike death and thrash, in which the chord changes and snare drum backbeats would accompany the racing pace of bass drum and strum, Gojira often keeps their chord changes and backbeats tectonically or at least relatively slow, appeasing those who find heaviness in speed and technique, as well as those who find it in the crushing lurch of slowness. In other words, the band is having their cake and eating it, too.
The precise interplay between guitar and drums required to create this sound is a testament to the intertwined musical careers of the Duplantier brothers, who seem to have leveraged their fraternal connection into an airtight compositional partnership, bringing to mind metal’s legendary Abbot brothers, Darrel and Vinnie Paul. While Gojira may not rival the mighty Pantera, these cheese-eating headbangers are doing a good job reinventing the steel.
Gojira opens for Behemoth at Slim's on Monday, Oct. 29.
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