Gojira Archives - NO CLEAN SINGING

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: GOJIRA, NIGHTRAGE, SHADE OF SORROW, AGELESS OBLIVION, [4672], VICTORY OVER THE SUN, URANIUM

Mar 272021

In yesterday’s round-up I burrowed deeply into the underground and surfaced with a collection of six songs that I thought were insane and unnerving in different ways. Today I’m on a different tack, leading off with some bigger names and then tunneling into underground depths again.

In addition, all of the following tracks were recommended to me by NCS colleagues and other friends. They didn’t let me down; hopefully you won’t feel let down either. There’s so much genre-spread here that you ought to find at least something that strikes a chord.

(I should mention that my friends didn’t just send me music. They also made me aware of the news that Meshuggah is recording a new album, and that it will feature the return of Fredrik Thordendal, trading places with Per Nilsson. They also passed along an announcement, accompanied by the photo of Peter Tägtgren above, that Hypocrisy’s new album has been completed.) Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GOJIRA, THE CROWN, VREID, DORDEDUH, KOLLAPS\E, VALDAUDR, DECLINE OF THE I

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 8 Responses »

Feb 172021

What follows is a collection of new songs and videos that different people messaged me about today, plus a few I had noticed in preceding days. With apologies to anyone who might care, I unfortunately don’t have the time to provide as many ~~stumbling~~ brilliant verbal descriptions of the music as I usually do, but nevertheless hope you enjoy all the sounds, as I have.

GOJIRA (France)

“Born For One Thing“: feverish tumult with slightly industrialized grooves, trademark atonal pounding, and gripping rhythmic interplay, plus eerie melodic accents… definitely in their comfort zone, and very good…. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GOJIRA, SÓLSTAFIR, TERATOLITH, SHEENJEK

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Aug 062020

Two old favorites released new singles yesterday, and not just bands who’ve been personal favorites for a very long time but bands whose music has continually evolved, which added a big curiosity factor to the experience. I’m beginning the round-up with those two tracks. As we’re want to do around here, I’m then moving into music from bands I’d never heard of before yesterday, bands whose profiles are buried far deeper in the underground than the first two.

GOJIRA

The beautiful animated video for Gojira’s new song is sufficiently engrossing that it pulled my focus away from the song when I first saw it. I definitely had impressions of the music, but needed to listen to it again without watching the video to better appreciate what the band were doing. The video is indebted to a certain work by the French author Pierre Boulle, but it’s especially haunting because of the perils of our current existence. Continue reading »

QUICK HITS: GOJIRA AND KATECHON

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 7 Responses »

Jun 262018

Given what I’ve planned to write for the site today, I don’t have time to compile the kind of typically large SEEN AND HEARD round-up I’d like to assemble, but enough time to do something shorter. And so I’ve resorted once again to the QUICK HITS concept that ran almost every day for a week not too long ago. Better than nothing, right?

GOJIRA

In August 2010 one of the people who started this site with me, but hasn’t been involved since 2011, wrote a post with this title: “Why Gojira Is the Best Metal Band in the World“. Almost eight years later, I’m pretty sure he still believes that. And after almost eight years that post still gets hits; in terms of traffic, it’s in the all-time Top 5 pages visited on our site.

Eight years ago, that writer was trying to draw more attention to a band that had only toured the U.S. once, as a support band for In Flames, and not even principal support — that position went to All That Remains. Now, of course, Gojira are a global phenomenon, and still have a soul. And In Flames and All That Remains? The less said about them in their current musical incarnations, the better. Continue reading »

OUR LIST OF 2016’s MOST INFECTIOUS EXTREME METAL SONGS (PART 6): GOJIRA AND YLIASTER

MOST INFECTIOUS SONGS-2016 5 Responses »

Jan 072017

Here’s Part 6 of this evolving list, in which I’m adding two more songs, one that I would guess will be well-known to most readers and one that may have been overlooked by most, or possibly forgotten because it appeared relatively early in 2016. Apart from the fun of running back through lots of good music over the last year, I entertain myself in putting this list together by deciding how to group songs for each of its Parts. I discovered some interesting similarities in these two songs that I thought would make them a good pairing.

To see the other selections for the list so far, as well as an explanation of what criteria were used in making it, go here.

GOJIRA

We received hundreds upon hundreds of reader suggestions for this list. I aggregated and alphabetized all of them, and that master list revealed that Gojira’s album Magma was the source of more reader recommendations than anything else released last year (narrowly edging Anaal Nathrakh). But the recommendations were split almost evenly between two songs: “Silvera” and “Stranded”, with one vote cast in favor of combining “Magma” and “Pray” into a single selection. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD ON A SATURDAY: ADE, GOJIRA, INTO ORBIT, KILL, PAIN, VALBORG, BLOODWAY, WITHDRAWAL

Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 3 Responses »

Jul 092016

If you’re reading this, it means you survived another week. Congratulations. That seems like good cause for celebration, since about 155,000 people die every day on average.

To help you celebrate, here’s a collection of new music I sifted from the never-ending torrent of new metal over the last 48 hours, presented in alphabetical order by band name.

ADE

The Italian death metal band ADE, whom we last mentioned in these pages almost four years ago, have a new album headed our way on July 15 via Spain’s Xtreem Music. Like its predecessors, Carthago Delenda Est again draws upon themes from ancient Roman history, and the title suggests that its focus is on Rome’s efforts to destroy the North African city-state of Carthage in the Punic Wars. The Font of All Human Knowledge tells us: Continue reading »

GOJIRA: “MAGMA”

Album Reviews 12 Responses »

Jun 032016

(Andy Synn reviews the hotly anticipated new album by Gojira.)

Although we often don’t bother with some of the “big” releases here at NCS (mainly because these artists will be getting more than enough coverage and promotion as it is), there are certain albums like Magma that it’s just impossible for us to ignore.

As you will probably have gathered by now, this album presents a very different side of the band than you might be used to. Oh, they’ve always had their proggy and more melodic inclinations, but they’ve never before expressed them as boldly and prominently as they do on their sixth album.

Make no mistake about it, this is the French foursome’s own Crack The Skye moment, a full-on embracing and shameless expression of their progressive proclivities which also just happens to be their most streamlined, emotional, and, yes, accessible album yet.

You needn’t fear that the band have gone soft on you, of course, or “sold out” (though I can already hear those cries of consternation emanating from certain corners of the Metal world), as there are still multiple moments of the quartet’s signature biomechanical bombardment to be found across the length and breadth of the album’s ten tracks.

However, Magma is definitely a step outside of the band’s established comfort zone (which was in danger of becoming a rut at times on L’Enfant Sauvage) and sees them plying some unfamiliar, though ultimately very rewarding, waters. Continue reading »

GOJIRA: “SILVERA”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 4 Responses »

May 202016

I haven’t heard Gojira’s new album Magma, but my comrade Andy Synn has. And last night he alerted me to the fact that Gojira would begin streaming a new song today — a song he described as “one of the really good ones” on Magma. And so they have. And so it is — really good, I mean.

The name of the song is “Silvera”, and it’s presented through a video directed by Drew Cox. The music is powerful and jolting, with a swirling Eastern-influenced melody that’s urgent and intense. It’s unmistakably a Gojira song, bursting with passion and displaying many of the band’s hallmark ingredients — yet it also differs from their past output, featuring more clean vocals (which will evidently be a hallmark of this new album) and coming to a close in a way that might seem premature in comparison with the band’s older work. Continue reading »

A NEW GOJIRA SONG: “STRANDED”

RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 14 Responses »

Apr 212016

In late March, when I read Rolling Stone’s interview/listening-session (here) with the Duplantier brothers about Gojira’s new album Magma, I became increasingly uneasy. Reading Kory Grow’s descriptions of some of the songs that he heard while talking with the brothers in their New York City studio made me fear that Gojira had morphed into a French variant of Mastodon, making a big sweeping turn into radio-friendly rock.

He wrote that “the band has taken a different route with the album compared to past riff-fests”, and referred to “almost-industrial rhythm[s]”, “brittle guitar line[s]”, “almost gothier riff[s]”, “Joe singing a monk-like chant”, “sorrowful, gothy vocals”, flutes and cowbells, and lots of four-minute songs because “people’s attentions are shorter now” (Joe’s words). In the final paragraph, Grow wrote, “they’re eager to show a different side of themselves on the new record and see how their fans react to it”.

Well, now we have some actual music, because within the last two hours, the band debuted a music video for the new album’s first advance track, “Stranded”. Continue reading »

SEEN AND HEARD: GOJIRA, KATATONIA, GOATCHRIST

Exceptions to the Rule, Metal News, RANDOM FUCKING MUSIC 16 Responses »

Mar 312016

photo credit: Travis Shinn

When names as big as Gojira and Katatonia both release new music on the same day, if you wait more than a few hours to write about it, the odds are that almost everyone who cares about those bands has already been clued in by someone else. But I’m writing about these developments anyway because “Half-Assed” is my middle name and I feel compelled to live up to it. And I’ll throw in a few other new developments that have been somewhat less pervasively recognized across the web.

GOJIRA

As I read Rolling Stone’s interview/listening-session (here) with the Duplantier brothers that appeared yesterday, I became increasingly uneasy. Reading Kory Grow’s descriptions of some of the songs from Gojira’s forthcoming new album that he heard while talking with the brothers in their New York City studio made me fear that Gojira have become a French variant of Mastodon, making a big sweeping turn into radio-friendly rock. Will their first video for the album include twerking? Continue reading »

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