GOJIRA ARE A JAM BAND
It’s been a long while since Roadrunner signed a reputable metal band on the up and up. Megadeth, Dream Theater, Rush and Opeth, some of their most recent signees, are all great bands to be sure, but all four were many albums into their career before moving over to Roadrunner. You’ve got to go all the way back to Trivium or possibly Killswitch Engage to find a metal band that Roadrunner scooped up from the underground and turned into a household name. Gojira are already established to some degree, sure, but while they’re loved and adored by the metal underground (relatively speaking), they’re not as well-known to mainstream metal crowds. Signing with Roadrunner signifies that both parties are ready to change that.
Can Gojira be the next household name in metal? They’re certainly good enough and have all the good-will of the metal underground backing them. Signing with a major label worked for Lamb of God and it sorta worked for Mastodon, but it was disastrous for Shadows Fall.
Anyway, Axl totally knocked it out of the park with an incredibly informative in-studio interview with Joe and Mario Duplantier last month; if you haven’t read it yet and you’re a Gojira fan, you owe it to yourself to do so right now. Decibel Magazine recently checked in with the latter, too, and got a juicy tidbit out of him about Gojira’s writing process. Unlike most bands these days who live in different cities and send files back and forth to write, Gojira actually still assemble in a room and jam everything out the old fashioned way! Quote:
What is your writing process like?
JD: We gather in a room and jam. Sometimes we will have ideas or feelings of what we’re gonna do but we are always surprised what comes out of it. It’s based on jamming. Sometimes, especially Mario and me, my brother and me, we have ideas, precise ideas of something we want to do and we try it and sometimes it leads to something else. Most of the time it’s jamming. I think it is important to keep that connection with the band feeling. Back in the day, Black Sabbath, Metallica, all these bands, they were jamming; there was no other option. They could not create music on a computer in their bedroom and then show up at the practice room or the studio to record it directly. Nowadays, bands put productions together with samples, they program the drums, then they show up to the studio and everything is quantized. In a way it’s good because you are getting closer to the composition; you have an idea in your mind and you don’t depend on the performance any more you can go straight to the idea. But when you can’t play it live the fans are disappointed and let-down. ‘OK, so these guys pretend to play this music; they can’t really play it.’ It means something; it has an importance to what you are going to play on the record, and it is even more important when it is created by the members from the jamming process, from that experience and that energy. Sometimes we play and it’s really shitty; we’ve got the idea in our minds but it’s not working, and then we’ll talk about it, play again and it sounds fantastic, just because we are having a good moment together. I think you can feel this on the record we are making now.
So there you have it. Gojira: the modern-day jam band. Phish, watch out.
-VN
