Album of the Month: October 2008
Album of the Month: October 2008
Gojira
The Way of All Flesh
I have a particular fondness for sludge metal. There are many proficient bands that strive for clarity in their guitar attack. This needn't be the only path. The practitioners of sludge metal recognize the powers of blunt instruments of destruction. They embrace the richness, density, and power of a sound with its body generated by grit and grime. They recognize that by wielding these tools and using them with precision, they introduce a new intelligible palette to the sound of metal. Muddy sounds do not need to sound like noise. Chords played using heavy distorted low notes on a guitar's sonic scale may sound muddier, but when given the room to breathe by succinct rhythmic forms, they are every bit as intelligible as open chords on an acoustic guitar. What they add is an unrestrained body-enveloping power that is absent from many approaches to metal rhythm guitar.
What makes Gojira an essential part of my metal catalogue is that they are the best band I've come across that recognizes this coarse line sludgy sounds tread between noise and musicality. Gojira lets their compositions weave between these two variations seemlessly. What is of great interest is that the vocals exploit this space as effectively as the guitars. Growls seemlessly transform into melodies and back. They don't do it in the way that Michael Ackerfeldt of Opeth treads the line - Ackerfeldt simply jumps between the two extreme poles of beautiful melody and guttural growling. Joseph Duplantier of Gojira is always a small step away from a tuneless coarse growl when he delivers his melodies.
While this subtle yet distinct quality of Gojira's music was first brought to my attention in Gojira's previous album "From Mars to Sirius", I found myself frustrated as often as I was pleased by the way they tread this sonic middle ground. Their had their approach perfected in brilliant tracks like Ocean Planet and Backbone, delivering the maximum blunt force impact, but other songs seemed to have the guitars are vocals working against one another, with a noisy guitar line neutered by an unnecessarily melodic vocal line or vice-versa. It hurt the pacing of the album to require the patience to reach the best-executed parts while maintaining a tolerance for the weaker tracks.
"The Way of All Flesh" on the other hand is an absolutely perfected manifestation of the musical approach of "From Mars to Sirius". What's even more exciting is that the album also manages to expand on the scope of "From Mars to Sirius" with the shocking gnashing teeth of the "The Way of All Flesh"'s drums. In FMTS, the rhythms felt conservative, giving the guitars room to breathe as the drums provided a proficient but typical double-kick pummeling. With TWOAF, something must have lit a fire in drummer Mario Duplantier, as this is the most refreshingly biting and technical drumming this side of of Meshuggah's Tomas Haake. Combining this into Gojira's already compelling musical palette gives "The Way of All Flesh" a relentlessly driving momentum. You want to be bludgeoned? This album will fucking annihilate you.