The Duty's Live Evil: Gojira!

Gojira/The Chariot/Car Bomb/Book of Black Earth

El Corazon, Seattle
May 18, 2009


Now you podcast listeners already know how much I love French metallers Gojira, about how 2006's From Mars to Sirius goaded me to check out tons of other great extreme metal acts, and about how The Way of All Flesh gets exponentially better each 'n every time I listen to it, right? So chances are you're also already prepared to hear me say how fucking killer and face-slayin' Gojira's hour-plus headlining slot was so I don't need to spend too much time on that.

What I do wanna spend some time on is how great it was to see the Corazon completely packed with metalheads of all shapes 'n sizes, all of whom came out to see Gojira and Gojira only, who jumped up and down and circle-pitted their way through every single song of the night, and who all knew they'd waited far too long to see these guys headline their own tour and completely tear the place down. I woulda been excited just to see the band rock the hell out of "Backbone" and "Ocean Planet" regardless of who was standing next to me, but seeing a guy in an Entombed baseball tee next to a kid in woman's pants next to a thirty-something used-ta-duder with a power gut and mortgage bill made me love the band even more than I already did, and that's something I didn't think could happen.

I also liked how Gojira frontman Joe Duplantier dished out some ultra-nice-boy stage raps about Greenpeace before launching into a brutally heavy song where he'd run across the stage and headbang face sweat into the front row, how merch problems had the band spray-paintin' shirts minutes before showtime, and how the guys had a tenth as much gear as the opening bands and yet sounded a hundred times better.

So the whole night, what'd it mean to the Duty? Easy! Great band. Great live show. Great songs. I went in knowing how I thought Gojira was a life-changing band in it for the long haul, but I left confident that any- and everyone who likes heavy music now or liked it in the past or who doesn't like it at all should pick up the Gojira catalog and turn it up loud 'cause it's just that good.

Here's some super-shaky fan-footage of "Clone," a song from the band's debut album Terra Incognita. Although I never ever listen to this one, it turned out being my favorite song of the night.