Saturday: Gojira - Pain is a Master

     As a service to any of you who patiently sat through all the metalcore this week, I'm going to keep the tr00 metal going in this belated Saturday post. As such, I encourage you to enjoy a cut from the most recent album from France's best metal export.

     It's been a few years since Gojira unleashed L'Enfant Sauvage on us, so we're about due for some new stuff, but for the time being we have to make due with what we've got. That's why your Saturday song is "Pain is a Master" from the aforementioned L'Enfant Sauvage. Whatever blackened, doomy genre label you choose to affix, it should be plenty metal enough for you.

Song of the Day: Gojira - Mouth of Kala

     In my recent Ten Best of 2012 post, I talked about how Gojira's L'Enfant Sauvage was my gateway into a band that I had previously only been kinda meh about. As I said in closing, I assumed that everyone was familiar with most of my list, but now a doomsday scenario occurs to me: what if you don't know Gojira, or you're like I was before my Franco-enviro-metal conversion? Today's song has been chosen with that hypothetical you in mind.

The United Nations of Metal

    I’ve got something kinda fun planned for this time out. Or at least I think it’s fun. Maybe I’m just a big dork. Anyways, some set-up: I recently got thinking about how insular we metal fans can be. I mean, we do listen to a pretty niche genre of music. Even your most mainstream modern metal bands, your Lamb of Gods (Lambs of God?), your Killswitch Engages, your Slipknots (OK, maybe Slipknot is a bad example...), even bands like these aren’t getting top 40 radio play, or appearing on People magazine, or even being followed by douchebags from TMZ. Even the biggest fish in the metal pond are seldom caught by the nets of mainstream popular culture. (How’s that for a metaphor?)

Song of the Day: Gojira - Liquid Fire

     Day 2 of Heavy TO prep here, and today I'm going to go with one of the bands that was originally on the bill but has had to back out -- there are in fact two now. If you've been following the Randy Blythe story at all you know that Randy is still in jail in the Czech Republic, so any summer dates Lamb of God had scheduled, such as Heavy TO and Heavy MTL, have been cancelled. In Flames have awesomely taken Lamb of God's spot at both shows.