Gojira’s music and aesthetic seems to really stand out against so many trends in metal nowadays — your songs aren’t all D&D, or fake Satanic, and yet they are definitely so pissed off and just as brutal-sounding as anything else being made.
For me it’s completely natural to do what we do. We’ve never thought “Let’s put together something and create something.” We started to play, and I started to sing about things that I care about, and my brother [drummer Mario Duplantier] and me were surrounded by art and poetry growing up, so the way I see my lyrics is mostly in a poetic way and an artistic way. But at the same time, we have a kind of consciousness that we are on a planet and it’s a very universal message that we have that is based on the will to evolve and be better people.
I don’t know; we were never attracted by gore, we didn’t do something to create an atmosphere, we were just trying to be honest to the music. To me, it’s not strange to do what we do.
Gojira’s sound has really expanded with each album, as has the ambition of each song-cycle: the thematic framework, the scope of the message, that sort of thing. Do you feel like with each album you have to outdo the last one?
I don’t know — it just goes together, you know? What we want to say and express is rooted in the music, it comes from the core of each song, the way the drums or guitar go, the sounds we want to hear, the kind of words we want to scream. It’s all tied together! It’s just one effort that creates all of it, the visuals, the lyrics, the overall expression evolves a certain way. It’s actually a little difficult for me to talk about it because I am in the band and I’m doing the music and I don’t have enough distance to really, you know, think about it from an outside perspective!
I can see that — it’s hard to see your own work objectively, once you’ve spent so much time with it in its creation.
Right! I mean, it’s mystical, you know? I don’t know how I’m doing it, or why I’m doing it, I’m just doing it! I don’t think too much about it. Sometimes when I catch myself thinking too much about what I’m doing I have to step back and stop for a second.
You guys are well-known for your environmental focus, especially recently with your work with Sea Shepherd; how did that come about?
I was watching a movie about sharks, and Sea Shepherd were featured in it, and I was struck by how they did things: they don’t think think too much, they work with their instincts and guts and they just go on the ocean and do what they think is right to do, and they’re highly criticized, because they use tactics that are called violent.
But there’s something similar in what we do, we use violent music to express a message that is peaceful, but there’s a sense of emergency in our music that I’ve found also in the way that Sea Shepherds do things.
The reason that 95% of all sharks are wiped out on this Earth, and the bottom of the oceans are completely destroyed, and people don’t really think about, because they have their noses in their iPads and iPhones and they don’t look around anymore, you know? Not that people were looking around before, but we weren’t destroying everything before, we didn’t have the tools; now we have them, and the earth is dying.
So when I saw this movie and saw what these guys were doing, I thought that I wanted to put the spotlight on them for our fans. The things we did with Sea Shepherds, we didn’t do much, but it was just a message to our fans that was like
“Hey, check this out, this is really important.” It isn’t just entertainment, it’s survival, it’s very very important.
Does it seem like a contradiction to make violent music that is essential for peaceful means?
In this great world of technology and communication, a lot of the living things are disappearing, even in human relations: how to truly listen to someone, how to truly be a human being and be balanced and centered, how not to become monsters. So in our music, there’s a sense of emergency, that’s why we’re playing hard and fast, yelling and screaming, because we’re a bunch of sensitive people worried about humanity. That’s how violence appears; although to me it’s not really violence, it’s just power, power that’s present because of the emergency of the situation.
SLAYER + GOJIRA + 4ARM :: Saturday, November 30 @ Tsongas Center at UMass Lowell, 300 Martin Luther King Way, Lowell, MA :: 7:30pm, all-ages, $23 to $47.50 :: advance tickets
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