I Just Read About That…

SOUNDTRACK: GOJIRA-L’Enfant Sauvage (2012).

Gojira is a French heavy heavy metal band, and this album was highly recommended back in 2012 (I didn’t realize it wasn’t their debut–they have quite a few records out already).  This album is quite heavy, but it has a lot of diverse elements to keep it interesting.

At the same time, they do rely on a couple of guitar effects which make the album weirdly samey (no idea if they do it on other albums too).  The two biggest offenders in this “repeated” scenario are the seeming over-reliance on the open high e string to add contrast to the heavy chugging chords.  It’s a cool effect once or twice but they do it a lot (especially in the song “The Axe” where it happens way too much and which is then followed by “Liquid Fire” where they do it again).  The other thing they do is this weird scraping sound.  It happens in the first few notes as the disc opens (in “Explosia”).  It’s a really cool sound and quite distinctive.  When you do a weird sound like that a lot in one song, it feels like maybe too much, but then to do it in several other songs, it feels like a crutch.

Which is a shame because the rest of the album is really interesting–the vocals are growly but audible and there’s occasionally really cool backing harmony vocals (“Liquid Fire”) and some really unusual different parts to songs.

So “Explosia” opens really heavy with a crazy riff and pounding drums (and that weird scraping sound).  I love that at 2:30 it switches from bludgeoning to slower (but still heavy) and that as the song fades out with another heavy section there are slow guitar notes that remind me of a Western.  It’s really cool. “L’Enfant Sauvage” uses that open high E string in an interesting riff (by doing more than just letting the string ring out).  (The scraping sound appears here too, but in limited quantity). I like the way the song’s volume just drops for the last thirty seconds or so.

“The Axe” opens with a pummeling drum and guitar sound.  “Liquid Fire” alternates between heavy guitars and that open high E sound.  “The Wild Healer” is a simple, pretty instrumental.  It is 2 minutes long and the main riff is simple one (again all on one string).  There’s an interesting solo that plays along behind the main riff which is quite pretty–but it all ends very abruptly.

“Planned Obsolescence” jumps right in with some pummeling guitars (an a scrape sound).  It slows down a bit, but towards the end the pummeling double bass drums resume until the really slow sweet guitar section that comes in around 3:45.  “Mouth of Kala” has a heavy riff which is a cool change (even if the riff is fairly simple).  But there’s some nice melodies that alternate with the heavy stuff.  I also really like the way the song ends with a very different riff and sound than the beginning.  (And the backing vocals are really cool too).

“The Gift of Guilt” has an interesting open E string riff (which is similar to Iron Maiden’s “The Trooper,” although they do something very different with it.  This song is just littered with odd effects, like a big heavy “bowh” sound and some high-pitched guitar pyrotechnics.  But I love the way it alternates parts (the growly vocals work really well here, too) and then ends so melodically.

“Pain is a Master” opens with a slow guitar riff and whispered voices, it’s a great change of pace for the disc.  Once the slow part ends, the guitars and drums pound furiously and we get some more odd effects–a siren sound (from the guitar) alternating with the ubiquitous scrape.  But the middle parts are really quite different, slower, slightly more menacing.  “Born in Winter” opens and closes with a slow and atmospheric section (delicate vocals even).  In the middle it gets heavier (and has some really fast drumming).

“The Fall” has an Alice in Chains vibe in one section and then a more cookie monster type vocal on another.  The scraping sound returns for a final showing. I really like the way the album just sort of disintegrated into random sounds as it ends.

So overall I really enjoyed this album. It’s probably nitpicky to complain about the overuse of certain sounds, especially since they are cool.  But they have so much creativity on the disc, that to hear the same things a few times just seems redundant.  Nevertheless the album rocks and is a really enjoyable metal album.  I was supposed to see them open for Mastadon earlier in the month but something came up and I had to eat the tickets (who knew you couldn’t even give away Mastadon/Gojira tickets, come on!).

[READ: November 21, 2014] Without Blood

I’ve been enjoying Baricco so much that I decided to grab this book while I was in the library too. I had already read this book a couple of years ago, or actually, I had read the version that appeared in the New Yorker.  The Wikipedia entry says that the New Yorker version is a”revised form” of the novel.  I didn’t know what that meant exactly.  But basically I gather it means that Ann Goldstein (who translated the New Yorker version) has re-translated the story (or that they edited it for the magazine the first time).

The New Yorker version is really long for a New Yorker story (it is practically the whole novel), so it’s understandable why things were a little shorter for the magazine.  But she hasn’t changed very much for the book.  There’s a lot of little modifications–tenses of verbs (in flashback situations), word phrases are altered, additional details seems to have been added and there is at least one small section in this novel that was not in the New Yorker version.

This “new” section is about a woman who is sitting in the cafe with them.  She asks the waiter about the two main characters and we learn a little about her past as well (it’s not relevant to the story and I can see why it was omitted, but it does flesh out the scene).  I am not willing to do a page by page comparison of the two (even though that is something I tend to do). But suffice it to say that the stories are virtually identical, although I found it more satisfying reading the novel version.

Since my original recap is basically how I would summarize it this time as well, I am including it here almost verbatim.  But in the spirit of the updated version of the novel, I am modifying this post from the original in small details–see if you can spot the differences.

The story opens on the farmhouse of Manuel Roca.  Three men, Salinas, El Guerra, and Tito pull up in a Mercedes.  Manuel Roca is the man they are looking for.  He has two children: a boy and a girl who is named Nina.  Roca tells Nina that she must hide when the men come.

Hide in the cellar and be absolutely still, no matter what happens, and don’t be afraid.  The son, slightly older, wants to help, he even has a gun, but Manuel tells him to hide in the woodshed.

And then the house is riddled with bullets.

Manuel survived that first round.  We get the point of view of Nina in the hole as she hears everything that is going on upstairs.  Then it switches back to Roca.  When he looks up, Tito (who was described as a boy but was in fact 20) is standing there with a gun pointed at him.  Tito shouts to  Salinas “IT’S TITO.  I’VE GOT HIM.”  When the other two get inside, they see that Tito has shot Roca in the arm because Roca had a gun.

When Salinas and Roca come face to face we learn that this fight has to do with the war (the introduction to the novel says that this is not based on anything–he simply picked Spain as his location because the names sounded sop beautiful).  Roca says the war is over, although Salinas, says “Not yours, not mine, Doctor.”  But during the war, Salinas had only shot a gun twice.  The first one was at no one–up in the air–the second was at his brother.  His brother lay dying in the hospital when the war ended.  Salinas went to the hospital with the intent of killing Doctor Roca and his men, but the doctor had fled, leaving all of the sick and dying unattended.  When Salinas’ brother asked him to kill him…please, he could only comply.

After this flashback, Roca’s son comes into the room with a shotgun.  From here the scene gets really violent with both Roca and his son killed.  The men realize that Nina must be there as well, so they look all over for her.  It is the boy, Tito, who finds her in the cellar.  They stare at each other, but Tito lets her live.  And the men leave.  After setting the house on fire.

Three days later a man on horseback found Nina and took her away.

Section II opens with a woman–she has an elegant walk and a tight black skirt.  She stops at a lottery ticket booth and asks the old man for a ticket.  They chat briefly and then the woman asks the man if he would like to have a drink with her. He says he can’t leave the booth but  then, “the woman nodded as if she had understood.  But then she leaned toward the man and said: ‘come with me.'”  And the man did.

On their way to the cafe he says he knows who she is.  That as a girl she saw three men kill her father in cold blood.  He confirms that he is the only one of the three left alive.  [Although it seems obvious in retrospect, I was blown away by that].

The remainder of section II looks at Nina (who was no longer known as Nina after that day).  She went to an orphanage where a man named Ricardo Uribe took her away.  He was a small town pharmacist and he told everyone that she was his daughter (he had just moved to the town).  From there we get two versions of her story.

One that she remembers and one that the man, Tito, had always heard about her (he kept tabs on her).  They are both variants of the truth.  This was a wonderful trick.  Neither story is particularly nice, and it’s possible that she doesn’t know which one is really true.  And this makes up the bulk of section II–stories of her marriage and children, her instability and madness and her eventual institutionalization and escape.

We also learn about what Tito’s life had been like since that day.  The stories he had heard, the understanding that Salinas and El Guerra died in strange and suspicious ways.

The obvious conclusion would be to have her murder Tito (which he believes will happen).  But the ending is much more emotional, much more unusual, much more profound, and perhaps a little upsetting. It’s a contradictory story, but it’s wonderfully told.

This is now the fourth or fifth book of Baricco’s that I have really enjoyed.  True I have picked most of his shorter books to read, so I’m not sure how he can handle a longer story, but I’ll be getting to those either before the year ends or early next year.