NEWS FROM FRANCE: GOJIRA, BLUT AUS NORD, FALL OF SUMMER, MONARCH

I spotted some news items over the last 24 hours that I thought were worth sharing, and the following four happened to all come from France, so I’m bundling them together here. There’s some new music at the end, too.

GOJIRA

According to a brief interview with Joe Duplantier backstage at the Sonisphere festival reported by Metal Hammer yesterday, Gojira will be embarking on a tour with Mastodon in October and will then be going straight into the studio to begin recording their sixth album for release in 2015. To listen to the audio of the brief interview, go here.

UPDATE: The Mastodon-Gojira North American tour has now been confirmed. Norway’s Kvelertak will also be on the tour, and the schedule can be found here.

And then, about an hour ago, Gojira began streaming a video on YouTube called “Summer Fest Part 1” with clips from some of their European festival appearances so far this summer, set to some slow, quasi-psychedelic instrumental music. Watch that next.

https://www.facebook.com/GojiraMusic

 

 

 

 

 

BLUT AUS NORD

Yesterday Blut Aus Nord posted this message on their Facebook page:

“Memoria Vetusta – Saturnian Poetry is recorded & mastered!”

It appears this will be the third part of a widely spaced trilogy that began with Memoria Vetusta I: Fathers of the Icy Age (1996) and continued with Memoria Vetusta II: Dialogue With the Stars (2006). The band’s label Debemur Morti Productions mentioned the album’s name last year, without much info about its projected release, but it seems it will be in our hands soon. Very much looking forward to this!

https://www.facebook.com/blutausnord.official

 

 

 

FALL OF SUMMER FESTIVAL

The festival poster you’re looking at appeared over the weekend, with additions to the line-up for the Fall of Summer festival scheduled to take place near Paris on September 5-6, 2014. It’s a hell of a line-up, isn’t it? There have been many times I wish France weren’t so far away from Seattle, and this is yet another one.

More info can be found here:

https://www.facebook.com/FallOfSummer

 

 

 

 

MONARCH

The French funeral doom band Monarch will have their debut album released by Profound Lore on July 22, under the title Sabbracadaver. It consists of three songs totaling 46 minutes — because it’s doooooooooom. The tracks are so long that the official video I’m about to play for you is an edited version of one of the songs (“Mortes”), which takes it down to a mere 6:41. Also, Monarch really doesn’t consist of triplets, despite the appearances in the above photo, nor has vocalist Emilie Bresson managed to clone herself. This is what Monarch look like:

 

photo by Fabien Monnet

 

Even at 6:41, “Mortes” casts a spell. It’s a crawling cascade of mountainous (correction: cavernous) riffs and titan-sized drum strikes, with eerie, ephemeral guitar melodies rising up like wraiths. Meanwhile, the afore-mentioned Emilie Bresson sounds like she’s being boiled alive. The video is suitably creepy, occult, and . . . levitating.

https://www.facebook.com/pages/Monarch/121146434822