Gojira: Long-Lost Sea Shepherd EP May Soon See the Light of Day!
The trials and tribulations of the Sea Shepherd EP have been ongoing for Gojira and their fans, who’ve been waiting patiently for its release since first learning about it in 2011. Multiple hard drive crashes and dozens of re-recorded tracks later, if frontman/guitarist/superhero Joe Duplantier is to be believed — and why wouldn’t he? — it seems that we may finally get to see this thing at some point in the near future.
Speaking to the radio station WMSC in Montclair, NJ, Duplantier revealed that steps are being taken to “put all of this back together” — specifically, an engineer is working on it right now at his and his brother’s Silver Cord Studio in New York — but cautioned against getting too excited just yet. Here’s the whole relevant segment of the interview, transcribed by Blabbermouth:
The goal of that whole [project] was to put the spotlight on Sea Shepherd Conservation Society. Which I think is important, as an artist, to put the spotlights on something more important than just being a band and promoting our band always; there’s other things to promote. And Sea Shepherd Conservation Society are doing an amazing job at protecting the oceans. They’re trying their best to save the few whales left alive. And there’s a few tunas, I think, they’re still alive in the ocean.
So we like to talk about them, and somehow, mission accomplished, because we brought a lot of people to their cause and we brought more attention to them. And they told us that too. [They said] ‘We noticed that we have more metalheads now subscribing and sending money.’ ‘Cause they work only with individual donations; they don’t work with any corporations or anything like that. So we like also the way they do things and their ethics.”
We recorded four songs. One was released — with Devin Townsend and Fredrik Thordendal from Meshuggah. The song is called ‘Of Blood And Salt’, and it was released in 2011. There’s three other songs that were on a hard drive that crashed at the time, and it was a huge pain in the butt to retrack all of this. But it was done, like, three years later. But we were such on a roll with the band and we were doing an album and going on tour that it was difficult to go back to that. But right now, as we speak, I have an engineer in my studio putting all of this back together and we’re trying to make this happen finally. But I don’t wanna make a statement, ‘Oh, this is the release date,’ ’cause I learned my lesson. I’ll talk about it when it’s ready, but I’m still working on it.
As our own Axl Rosenberg said this past July, most Gojira fans have by now made their peace with the loss of the Sea Shepherd EP, whatwith Gojira having released two full-length albums in the meantime. Still, more Gojira is never a bad thing, and it would certainly be a treat to hear the collaborations with Max Cavalera, Lamb of God’s Randy Blythe, and In Flames’ Anders Fridén — assuming those tracks were able to be rescued or re-recorded — in addition to the one with Townsend and Thordendal we’ve already heard. We will, naturally, keep you posted.
In the meantime, Gojira have a few dates left of their current tour with Torche and Code Orange; dates here.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wWDdDm-Vu8Y
