Gojira @ The Palladium, Worcester, MA
Live Reviews | Oct 23rd, 2016
Date: October 22, 2016
Opening Band: Tesseract
Touring in support of one the year’s best Metal releases ‘Magma’, Gojira returns to the Palladium in Worcester, Massachusetts for it’s 10th appearance at the venue. The line wrapped around the building as this would be my 5th time seeing them in the New England area.
Opening the show would be Tesseract. After circling through 2 other singers they settled back with the singer from their first EP so it’s pretty much a bigger budget version of the band I saw open for Devin Townsend several times on the smaller room tour. Unfortunately, the extra lighting did little to excite me as I find their brand of what’s been jokingly described as “elevator metal” to be a tad boring. The clean arpeggios start to put you to sleep and a quick Djent-y part kicks in to attempt to wake you up. I’m sure this is a band that sounds great on CD but in a live setting opening for a really heavy band, it just doesn’t work here.
Gojira was up next, with a beefed up stage production including newer light displays and foggers and screen projections. They came out swinging, opening with “Only Pain” and then pummeling the crowd with “the Heaviest Matter of the Universe”. The set consisted mostly of material from ‘Magma’ and the crowd ate it up. It’s amazing the command the band has over it’s material and never once did they let up, leaving the crowd without a chance to recover from the constant assault on the senses, both audio and visually.
As for the rest of the set, earlier material was represented throughout the set, including “Clone” which appears on the recently re-released ‘Terra Incognita’. Absent from the set was any representation of material from the band’s previous album ‘L’enfant Sauvage’, which the band did tour heavily on, but a bit of bummer none of that material was represented here. But it was great to hear classics like “Backbone”, “Vacuity”, “Oroborus”, “Toxic Garbage Island” and “Wisdom Comes”
Overall this is one of the strongest metal bands to come out in the last 20 years. This band is further cementing a legacy of powerful and articulate music that can be appreciated by both metal-heads and more artsy people. Make it a point to see Gojira at least once live, you will not regret it.
