SO I didn’t end up going to any shows or anything that would qualify for a review in the timeslot required for this last week, so I’m doing an album review instead. Gojira’s “From Mars To Sirius” isn't a new album or anything, it’s a metal album that was released 6 years ago in 2005 that I’ve owned since 2007. I listened to it again after a long time last night, the cut-off night for this week’s reviews and upon realizing that I had nothing to review for this time period I thought this would be a strong candidate. Because it’s such a fucking good album.
This is a heavy metal album in the heaviest sense. It has an ocean/space theme throughout and the music actually manages to portray the crushing deepness and hugeness of being in the darkest part of the underwater or interplanetary distances. It’s not a light-blue version of the ocean it’s a black, deafeningly black version that has a million pounds of weight on every step. It feels impenetrable at times and yet completely immersive as well. This is a very, very good album by a very good band playing a diverse style of metal that bridges death metal aesthetics, progressive thematics, and an almost industrial sense of blunt rhythmic patterning.
There are a few songs on here that act as interludes of sorts because they are the softer, nicer songs in comparison with the straight-ahead driving metal (which is somewhere in-between Meshuggah, Fear Factory, and Strapping Young Lad but in my opinion much better than any of those bands) that comprises most of these songs. Although they’re probably the throwaway tracks for most metalheads, with my appreciation for indie rock and post-rock, it’s easy to identify interesting quasi-Mogwai or quasi-Dredg moments in these softer songs that are a stark contrast to the rest of the album and yet fit the overall theme well nonetheless.
The song “World to Come” displays a certain amount of influence from stoner metal or classic doom metal in that it features a prominent, semi-bluesy guitar riff that’s a bit off-kilter from the normal type of guitar work Gojira puts out there. Still, the dirging of the rhythm section, perhaps one of the most crucial rhythm sections in modern heavy metal if only because they are so important to making the band stand out, makes the song sound like it fits on the album.
The real highlight for me is the album’s opening track, “Ocean Planet.” It makes use of the themes that I elaboratd earlier in this review to the most obvious yet meaningful and identifiable way and it really shows how strong of a band Gojira is musically. They have this weird slide thing on the guitar that they do partway one of the bridges; it has got to be so easy once you know how to do it but goddamn it sounds badass. The song is filled with a kind of monumental urgency, like the huge moving of a tidal wave taking with it every living thing that might be in the way.
What’s strange is that I am just now at the end of writing this review realizing that I am writing about a band with a name rooted in Japanese culture (they used to be called Godzilla but there were too many legal loopholes and Gojira is the Japanese pronounciation so they went with that) and their album that has a heavy emphasis on the ocean and its overwhelming deepness and unknown power, on the weekend when Japan itself got hit by the largest earthquake in the country’s history followed by a gigantic tsunami. My mind has been on those events for the last 24 hours or so and it wasn’t until I was writing about the wave-like heaviness of “From Mars to Sirius” that I realized the correlation.
Strange.
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