The Apparatus

 Sunday, 05 October 2008 That music sheet was giving me headaches. And I'm being literal. Not because of it's complexity. No, because of it's unbearable simplicity.

After my morning chocolate milk, I often feel good. I also feel a kind of excitement when I'm about to listen to something that has potential to be awesome. I hated From Mars To Sirius. But I loved The Link. Will this be the right side of the coin-toss that is Gojira to me? I would have to say...

No compromise, no intro, you recognize them 4 seconds in. Just like you'd recognize Spiral Architect's music after 3 seconds, or Cynic's after 2. This massive sound surrounds the elements around you and arouses your senses because these guys create a savage-driven intensity with "almost nothing". You will rarely find more than 5 notes in most of Gojira's songs, yet it all succeeds in making your ears deliver a rightfully shed blood. The absurdity of words might be the result of a sleepless night and a merciless back, but there is something about the writing of this music that forces respect.

Rhythms flow and drum patterns dissect the structures of what can only be described as a furious Gojira. The band delivers with The Way Of All Flesh an aggressive effort, with nothing much new I gotta say, but enough to give many a thorough lesson in rythmical accuracy, massive sound research and the creation of a genre almost specific to the band.

Less clean vocals make this effort delicious to me, and even though their strong focus on lyrical themes sometimes makes the vocal lines overshadow (in a -very- bad way) the music (first measures of The Art Of Dying serve as one of many examples), I can't help but appreciate the atypical tone of this guy's voice.

Admiration? Certainly not. Respect? A lot of it, for these guys' playing, their ideas, their universe, and the quality of their performance. The Way Of All Flesh is a very good album that would have deserved in my humble opinion a more focused vocal approach, but that easily gets out of that consideration by serving a well of intelligently crafted musicianship and modern writing.

I was once again in awe and admiration looking at Ligeti's sheets for "Musica Ricercata". Where from formally nothing gets created one of the most impressive approaches to progressive writing. Headaches kept sweetly accompanying me throughout my day as I thought of a response to my only question in this review...

Oui.

 Wednesday, 19 December 2007 When you send an album you define as "technical" to the cocky prick I am, you'd better make sure there's enough in there to make me smile, pout, spit, loathe your genius or write five regular albums with the lines of just one of your songs.

The very core of me will sweat crap on a musical creation if my shitty elitist standards aren't met.

I hope you're starting to hate me right now because otherwise I'd be miserably failing my lame linguistic tour-de-force.

I hate a lot of things, including lol, God, Satan, Charles Manson and Tokyo Hotel, but 1980 I don't hate. At all.

This band is the French sartorial equivalent of a perfectly tailored Gucci jacket. Complex arrangements, nice textures, clear cut and awesome production.

I also hate intros, but this one reminds me of Anglagard, and that draws a smile on my lips, so I don't precipitate my fingers on the FF button of my iPod.

I will not waste your time with useless musical dissections of each and every track, the album as a whole is a good balance of progressive rock/metal arranged in and with complex clean layers, shaped in a crystal clear sound that lets you appreciate each instrument's technical aspects, and although you can feel Mats & Morgan's influence like a knife tightly pressed under your throat, that can only be a sign of distinguished quality now can't it?

Now for the gossip columns: I'm secretly in love with Sharon Tate, and I can't keep a secret.

And we're back.
Think Meshuggah went progrock, think instrumental Cynic, think aforementioned Mats & Morgan gone metal. These guys can play and they make you feel they play it easily, the perfect turn-on for me. There's the metal violence you crave, the technical aspect we're all apparently fond of, the structures we praise, the jazzy elements we admire and the melodic content to make it all deserve a "three-spins-a-day" status.

Now... Influences are a chef's dish you use to get inspired, not a recipe you steal, and to be quite honest, when I first listened to some lines of 1980, I thought I was listening to some new material from Mats & Morgan. Now once again, that's a compliment, but it's also the only negative point of this album. Some lines, taken separately, sounded to me exactly like some ideas of Mats & Morgan's "Ta Ned Trasan" or "A Skizophrens Dagbok"; but then carefully listening to the album as a whole, we discover new directions, specific ideas and subtleties that make us appreciate the effort as an entity to be recognized as a separate whole. Now that's something when it's this kind of music you're writing.

1980: trying it, is adopting it.
Damn, French slogans are so lame...