How to listen to epic music

Out of the red, Macbeth recommended Gojira. I tracked down (aka., streamed for free) a copy of The Way of All Flesh:

As I listen, as I type, I am periodically raising the horns and psuedo-head-banging as if I was really there. (My five year-old daughter raises the horns, also, and makes them say "maa;" after all, she likes goats.)

Truth be told, I was a teenage metal fan, and whenever I hear the stuff there's a part of me that wants to leap up and touch the ceiling, suddenly realising that I am a boy in a man's body, properly tall and athletic; it's a shame that the latter no longer pertains. This does, however, highlight an important potential strategy in listening to Gojira or any other extreme metal: retreat from your parents to your darkened chamber, light incense, and play it so loud that the neighbours complain.

There's a bit of an art to listening to progressive death metal, and enjoying it. You could start with a genealogy, positioning progressive death metal amongst its brothers and sisters, parents and children. Heavy metal is rife with subgenres, and it might be important to know what you are dealing with.

This isn't alternative music (NSFW: full frontal nudity--male and female; I had no idea Vodafone ads were so risque), or even the industrial metal, funk metal, or alternative metal (you can see me thirty rows back, to the right of the sound-stage), I've listened to since my teenage years.

Nor is it attention-seeking therapetic thrash metal, or any of those other appealingly named metal genres: Metalcore, Crust Punk (surprisingly punky), Stoner Metal (the genre that includes its own instructions for optimum enjoyment), Groove Metal (surprisingly groovy), Drone Metal (like Philip Glass, this uses refrain as drone), Grindcore (and its own subgenres Deathgrind, Grindgore, and Pornogrind--this is unsurprisingly NSFW), or Sludge Metal.

We're not talking about mainstream Hair Metal, Glam Metal, Neo-classical Metal, or Nu Metal. 

Do not confuse Gojira with Norwegian Black Metal; not for Gojira the light-hearted shenanigans and gentle hi-jinks of that scene, which include burning down 850 year-old churches, and slaying rival gang band members...

This, of course, is the lie of heavy metal. While there are occasional munters out there who put 'gangster' rap in its place,  even the most mental metallers mostly mean well. When my diminuitive flatmate went upstairs to complain to our neighbour about the incessant kick-pedal hammering on her ceiling, she was treated to craven apologies from a remorseful man; when I went up a few days later, he wouldn't even answer the door, and we haven't heard it since. When they have their parties there will be several hours of extreme metal, but after that they will be singing sixties hippy hits--in the end, "Love is All You Need."

There's a lesson in this, too; the origins of heavy metal, which are close to Ozzy Osbourne's Black Sabbath, if not actually there, are most often songs about being misunderstood, being in love, or the horrors of war.

Back to Gojira--remember Gojira; this is a post about Gojira--they, too, have a focus on the gentle things in life, on the environment, and on the pain of existence. These are hippies, as these lyics attest:

Toxic Garbage Island

Mysterious form, soul in the dark
under this heavy sealing concrete waves
Followed by servants, funeral cortege
this pale ghost is gathering his strength

Ghost, pale, the procession is crawling

This is good heavy metal; death and concrete, souls and darkness; but wait:

Plastic form dead things it is now so clear
How could I fail to understand
Cities are burning the trees are dying
My heart awake but still
pain is killing me
Pain is killing me

So it moves onto the struggle between an inauthentic, urban existence of plastic and the death of nature; typical heavy metal themes and consonant with the albumn title (The Way of All Flesh), and it goes on: 

Take this pestilent destruction out of my way
The great pacific garbage patch is exhausting
And the world is sliding away
in a vortex of floating refuse
With the sacred one you have lost

So now we see; it has a specific focus to match its metaphysical themes, the garbage that pours into the Pacific Ocean and, in particular, the Great Pacific Garbage Patch.  So, while the concluding line might seem trite in its own right:

Plastic bag in the sea
Plastic bag in the sea
Plastic bag in the sea
Plastic bag in the sea 

With a pile of existential angst, combined with contemporary environmental motifs, bless their cotton socks.

Listening to Gojira, one is blessed with a plenitude of music. In fact, it is like there are two bands playing at once. Don't get me wrong; these two bands play together very well, with pin-point harmony and precision, exactly as if they were one band.

One may query the wisdom of adding a double kick-pedal to heavy metal, and Traditional Heavy Metal didn't deploy the dreaded beast with two treads. Led Zeppelin dismissed it out of hand--as far as all were concerned, including the man himself, John Bonham made quite enough noise without one. Nonetheless, the sheer amount of drumming available to a good thrash drummer with a double kick pedal is a thing to behold, and in Mario Duplantier, Gojira certainly has one of those.

That Duplantier could play the kick drum as fast as he does, for as long as he does, is a thing of wonder, a piece of athleticism rivalling any Olympic competitor, that he could do it with style and precision is bamboozling--and yet, he does, and at the same time as he is kicking out c.180bpm of kick drum, as if unconscious to its cacophany, there is also a decent drummer putting out some interesting beats.

Meanwhile, the Beatles--or a kind of French Beatles with growling vocals instead of Liverpudlian twang--might be playing along; melodic Bach-like sequences on lead guitar and melancholy lyrics about the misery and guilt caused by our degradation of the environment.

What is established, then, is the possibility that there can be pure thrash (double kick drum mayhem, perhaps, with sledge-hammer bass, a pile of rhythm guitar bar chords that could drive a freight train), at the same as a second band plays something altogether different--peaceful and reflective music of the kind made by singer/song-writers.

Truth be told, I generally don't have any much time for these kinds of music, in their own right; it's just lucky there's a third kind of music going at the same time.

The Way of All Flesh is heavily composed, with long, slow, quiet passages building slowly or leaping suddenly into pure cacophany; heroic drops and breaks; in short, heavy classical composition. Katherina described it as operatic; high praise from her, perhaps, but I describe good opera as very metal, which gives me the opportunity to quote Adrian Edmondson's jacket.

This third band could be Pink Floyd, but has more of the aura of Journey, early Genesis, Focus, Rush, Hawkwind, Earth Wind and Fire, King Crimson... you get the point: I can list ProgRock bands with the best of them. That's where the "progressive" in Progressive Death Metal comes from, explaining its differences from Technical Death Metal (surprisingly technical) and Avant-garde Metal (surprisingly accessible--for extreme metal), as much as its similarities to Viking Metal, Celtic Metal and Folk Metal.

ProgRock, along with being amongst the most maligned music in Christendom, is marked by its elaborate constructions. It moves from the maudlin horror of the quiet, folksy singer-songwriter to epic heavy instrumental riffs and back effortlessly in the same--epically long--song. It incorporates elements of other music genres (folk, jazz and classical in particular) into epic concept albumns. Gojira does all this and more: it demands that you listen to all this in one sitting, and your refusal is an epic assertion of yourself.

Gojira, consciously or otherwise, insists that you love this music on your own terms. You can admire the athleticism and vituousity, you can marvel at the mesh of styles and the fact that it works at all, you can celebrate or lampoon heartfelt lyrical sensibilities, you can marvel at heavy metal in toto in its profusion of genres and subgenres, or you can relive the best moments of an adolescence you may never have had.

Did I mention that there's a bonus track? Epic.