A little less than halfway through L'Enfant Sauvage, the excellent fifth album from French metal masters Gojira, the tone shifts dramatically. For the first four tracks, the technically sophisticated band extends a blitz of intensity, with drummer Mario Duplantier sending up rapid, precise salvos from behind the field-marshal bark of his brother Joseph. But during the 108-second "The Wild Healer", Mario slows to a steady snare-and-cymbal trot, the guitars circling overhead in two repetitive riffs. They just sit there, too, letting the guitars squeal a bit more and the distorted bass swell through the mix.
Of course, this is just an interlude, as "Planned Obsolescence" rips through the relative silence with the same ferocity as the record's front end. But the pause offers perhaps the most revealing moment on L'Enfant Sauvage, an album that earns the rank of Gojira's best work to date not only because the Duplantier brothers are Meshuggah descendants with a head for melody, but also because it's so well paced. Go back through those first four tracks: Opener "Explosia" appropriately explodes from its haunches and then roars, with Joseph beginning the album-length story about a person's slow fight against self-depravity like he's shouting loud enough to purge the process from himself. But then the seven-minute track eases into a blur of guitars and mid-tempo march, Joseph's growl now enhanced by the hints of a hook. The title track, which follows, builds tension for half of its length by extending one riff, stopping it, and playing it again; just when the tease starts to get tedious, though, Gojira finally spring forward into the kind of violently controlled breakdown that reminds you what a circle pit is for. It's exhilarating because it is so expertly timed. Still, after a minute or two of that melee, the quartet buries itself with a sudden fade, as if they've disappeared into the mouth of an abyss. As a whole, L'Enfant Sauvage is exhausting. But taken bit by bit, it's awesome.
Gojira take most of their twists and turns within songs-- that is, the bulk of L'Enfant Sauvage churns and sprints and charges, with tangents taking shape within the songs rather than dictating them. Though "Pain Is a Master", for instance, opens with a moody mix of field recordings and forlorn acoustic guitar, it rights itself with rigid force soon enough. Aside from a late-song onslaught, "Born in Winter" is Gojira's attempt at a ballad, with Duplantier doing his best solemn grunge moan above a rapid guitar line that serves more as a canvas than a progression. Even amid the heaviest bits, Duplantier sings like he's staring at an arena of lit lighters, letting the glow of this narrative drift toward its end. In that way, Gojira recalls Baroness, a band that uses a much different strain of heaviness toward the same end. As Gojira do with their feverish wizardry, Baroness play to their mid-tempo strength only to then play against it constantly, breaking the pace (and concomitant expectations) with tangents that strengthen the record's general rigors. For L'Enfant Sauvage, that plan works just as well within individual songs as it does across the entire album.
This record revolves around struggling toward transcendence or, at the very least, working to avoid the mire of self-destruction. "One day, we'll wake up from this absolute nonsense," Duplantier charges toward the end of "Planned Obsolescence", a pulverizing piece of thrash that seems to wink, at points, to bands like Shellac before shrieking toward the exit like grindcore on fire. "Conscience awakened, we'll take it from there." A decade into their career, that's a fitting moral for the story of Gojira, a band that's occasionally stumbled (2008's less-than-stellar The Way of All Flesh) after great success (2005's deserved breakthrough, From Mars to Sirius) to arrive at one of the most riveting and challenging metal records of the year. This quartet's nothing if not an adroit and agile rock band, prone to acrobatic guitar lines and rhythmic shifts capable of inducing whiplash. For these 52 browbeating but not-quite-brutal minutes, they recognize that those moving parts aren't enough to make a great album. With that realization in mind, they've done exactly that.
