Gojira - Magma

Magma is, without a doubt, my favorite album that came out in 2016. I know that it came out in June and that a lot had already been said about it around the time of its release, but its impact on metal last year was huge and it sustained discussion about itself and its creators all through the year. It became my favorite album from a band who I already had immense respect and adoration for, and I was fortunate enough to see them tour in support of it and play six of its songs live. (“Pray” was so insane live.) Considering the album conjured up their first two surprising Grammy nominations (as the Grammys are usually pretty ridiculous) and considering the fact that this is my blog and I can write about whatever I want, I think it’s still perfectly relevant to write about an album from last year that I ABSOLUTELY LOVED. I fear this might get pretty long.

I’ll keep from going through every little detail from the album that made me love it (and also from the few moments that weren’t perfect) because I know that each song would take a LONG time. But while I’m here I can’t help from fawning over the excellence of the tone set by the catchy groove of the opening track, the cathartic solo in the Grammy-nominated track that gracefully follows the opener, the combined power of the drums and vocals on “The Cell”, the straightforward and memorable mid-paced groove and vocal prowess on “Stranded”, the meditative state the title track generates, the infectious “Bleed”-like rhythm that “Pray” uses more convincingly than any other band that has tried to rip off the now-classic Meshuggah drum pattern, the anthem-like quality of the death metal riffing in “Only Pain”, and the touching lyrics and perfectly designed cadential aura of the brothers’ tribute to their late mother on “Low Lands”. Wow, that was a long sentence!

When Magma came out last June, and when “Stranded”, “Silvera”, and “The Shooting Star” helped prepare the metal world for it, the obligatory debate over Gojira’s masterfully intense and technical death metal taking the back seat to this new, proggy, groove-centered, and diverse style they debuted. It seemed unusual to me at first too, but it didn’t take long for me to see that this was still Gojira playing to their strengths, only this time it was strengths they hadn’t revealed before. One of my favorite things about the album, which was discussed significantly as part of their change in style, is Joe’s vocals. I already worshipped the special, melodic, burning growls that enriched every one of their previous albums, but his clean singing especially on this album helped especially well to set the bar unimaginably high for them now. The songs on the album fit snuggly with his unique register and his varied, nonformulaic use of his clean and gruff vocal styles throughout the album compliments the music exquisitely, setting atmospheric moods with clean singing and breaking those atmospheres down resonantly with reintroduced howling, and swirling that majestic chaos back into meditative mood after meditative mood of blast-beat-y hammering. Indeed, many of the brutal moments on the album are just as ambient and meditative as they are blood-pumping and head-banging, an art that resembles the hard-to-capture duality of the violent jazzy metal tranquility of Meshuggah. The naturalist vibe and message Gojira has already cultivated is enriched in the lyricism and the successful experimentation with their sound on Magma. The expansion and molding of the ambient component of their sound, which people complained about having replaced the nonstop torrent of overwhelming technical death metal, both provides more of Gojira to love, and highlights what most of the band’s fans already loved about them. The heavier moments stand out more with the mix of relative calmness into the tracks and resurge with the real force that keeps the punch from becoming numbing the way a lot of music by the likes of Nile or Decapitated often does, and in that regard, the heavy is really heavy, due credit also being due to the mixing and mastering work done on the album. It does not flash all its magic at once and fizzle out after one listen either. The songwriting throughout the album is interesting and beckons many repeated spins to become connected, and rewardingly so, with its every enthralling nuance; I’m listening to it right now, with all my appendages pulsing with more of Magma’s moments and spirit than the last time I listened to it. I often yearned for the album to be longer when I was giving it early listens, because it’s just so damn compelling, but it really is crafted to impart a specific experience in exactly the time of what it already presents. I could go on and on and relay more poetic praise for what Gojira has done for me personally with this album, but this is already pretty lengthy.

This album has meant a lot for me, and also a lot to the band themselves (Mario and Joe especially evidently) and to the metal community and our music as a whole. It was a triumphant delivery after the four-year wait between L'Enfant Sauvage and their new album’s release after many were underwhelmed or indifferent to Metallica’s comeback and even disappointed with Meshuggah’s studio return. Indeed, despite many other huge figures in metal (Metallica, Avenged Sevenfold, Meshuggah, Deftones, Opeth, Rob Zombie, Korn, Megadeth, Dream Theater, Anthrax, In Flames) dropping many highly-anticipated albums, Magma and everything that went along with it really made 2016 Gojira’s year. The enigmatic nature of the album that made it hard for the metal sphere to finish its first rounds of talking about it, the massive tour the band set out on to celebrate it, and their tasteful, refreshingly artful social media presence (their tour diaries being outstandingly gorgeous and worthwhile, and Evil Mario being an awesome window into their goofiness behind the scenes) certainly also helped them end up in many metal publications and topping their year-end lists by December’s closing.

It’s also worth talking about how all of this culminated in Grammy nominations at the end of the year for Gojira. The Grammys have ever been a somewhat redundant ceremony to parade what everyone already knows has made the most money that year based on its hard-to-avoid splatter across radio and social media, and ever since their infamous snub of …And Justice for All, they have never really been taken too seriously or even passionately in the context of metal, which is minimally represented anyway. Even their metal picks seem to be pretty consistently basic and out-of-touch most of the time; although I do find it funny how much silverware they give Metallica now that they’re huge and they know they goofed back in 1988. But this year, they seem to have run their finger luckily across the giant pulse Gojira made in metal, and they seem to have picked up on just how significant Magma was this past year because they nominated the entire work for an award and not just the most accessible single. They also noticed, to my amazement, the fabulous work Baroness did at the end of the previous year. Even though most of us don’t really get our hopes up for the Grammys recognizing meaningful work in this genre, it’s somewhat reminiscent of Metallica’s first nomination almost 30 years ago; a somewhat underground band’s (pretty underground for the Grammys) death metal-marinated album in the hard rock category, one that really made waves and earned its reputation. It’s sort of a significant moment for death metal, even if Magma doesn’t win. But if it does, it would be a sight to behold, and what would that mean for metal in the world to come? Would it boost interest in the styles of metal Magma is rooted in? Would that interest develop invested participants in metal culture or just shallow visitations to these trends of desperate fame-seekers the way a lot of dime-a-dozen djent music has emerged since Meshuggah’s breakthrough and how blackgaze has become battling grounds ever since Deafheaven’s explosion onto the scene? Would nothing happen because we ignore the Grammys for the most part now and don’t consider their voice accurately representative of metal? I don’t know, and it’s too early in the morning to speculate now, so I’ll stay on the topic of Magma.

I feel like there were so many points I wanted to make about this album and its contextual presences and that even though this is long and winded, I’m forgetting something. I’ll quickly mention that I love the artwork associated with the album; I’m a sucker for volcano-related stuff and I love the front cover artwork and I’ve been meaning to get the visual companion. Call me a fanboy, but the primal, cave-painting-esque art style really fits the nature-centric theme of their music and I dig it. I’ll mention that I have this album on record as well and I love displaying and looking at that large square piece with the sunshine volcano eruption while I play this thing. The vinyl itself is quite crackly, but strangely, I don’t mind for this one.

I’ll finish this off by just saying thank you if you read this. I know this was long and I understand if you just skimmed it. I did this in one sitting and I’m sure there are some typos and convoluted sentences. The long sentences thing tends to be the way I write, and I can’t help but write extensively because I just adore this music so much. So, thank you again; see, I can’t even finish this tacked-on paragraph briefly without trying to discuss something.

Thank you whoever reads this. Thank you, teriyaki turkey jerky, for getting me through this. And thank you Gojira for Magma and everything else!