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Versione 1
Rating:
The headiness is intense from the very first minutes. The sun mercilessly beats down on the crowd of metalheads who, at 7 PM, break through the gates and begin to gather beneath the stage. A tribe of freaks, each donning a thick cotton shirt bearing the names of more or less context-appropriate bands: Nile, Opeth, Mastodon, Metallica. Each carries a piece of their personal epic on their shoulders and displays it proudly. A small army of barbarians, burly men with Viking beards, chubby and pimply youths, tattooed Valkyries, dark-hued pin-ups with flaming lipstick and boots that ferment terrifying bacterial colonies in the 35-degree heat of Sesto San Giovanni.
In front of me, right in the front row, leaning against the barrier is an old enchantress, bronze skin weathered by the years clinging to a slender, radiant face where two opal eyes are set, hair white as tangled tentacles, pinned here and there by some clips. Beside her, an ebony girl screams like a Bantu witch. Just behind, an ivory priestess observes the unfolding music with a glacial demeanor. Surrounding us, a tribe of savages.
Each concert has its own human variety. Here, we aren’t quite following the coordinates of old-school metal, yet the atmosphere is the same: uninhibited, barbaric, profoundly carnal in performing the rite that unfolds in torrents of sweat, odors, pushes and counter-pushes, a war of bodies intertwining and trying to endure. There are veterans who mosh, mythical bearded beasts, throwing themselves onto the crowd, cursing and writhing; next to them, skinny and almost formal youths concerned about not dropping their plastic bottle, or unsuspecting maidens in bras or little more who want to mix with the demonic rite, as if to initiate themselves. They ask to be lifted to do their crowd surfing and emerge from under the stage swollen with ebullience.
The ramshackle mass of human beings agitates, shakes as if crazed, in turnstiles that seem like tribal feasts, falling and rising again, compressing until feeling the lungs squeezed. Meanwhile, the t-shirts are in a state of putrefaction from sweat, arms and bodies rub against each other slick with their own malodorous humors. The faces around, somehow, bear a mark of pain, more or less aware, a suffering to be expiated, to be purged like a poison that can only be liberated through this bacchanal that dispenses ecstatic pleasures and suffering, a collective decay, the self-inflicted toil to be reborn purified.
Before Gojira, Employed To Serve (Vikings lashing the air with their wall of guitars) and Alien Weaponry (New Zealand Maori mixing things up with somewhat offbeat drum riffs) perform. It’s a good listen, the crowd is already in a frenzy, there’s quite a crush and someone starts walking on the crowd. But when Gojira enters at 9 PM, the situation deteriorates. Whether it’s Mario Duplantier pounding on the double bass like a machine gun, or his brother Joe’s screams, the music soon becomes a simple and almost indistinct soundtrack to the diabolical circus that erupts there in the middle of the floor. Bodies continually fly, arms and legs are lost in the chaos, someone feels ill, others bicker. There’s a circle of hell throwing obscene cries just a few meters from the barriers. The putrefaction is complete.
Gojira performs many tracks from their latest two albums, not the most brutal of their career. Yet the live fervor and Mario's blasting reinvigorate even the songs that hadn’t entirely impressed on record. But the gems come from their previous works: Flying Whales and L'Enfant Sauvage above all. Rhythmically, I’ve rarely heard better; it’s a massacre, but if I have to say it all, this concert confirms some of the band's limitations: a lack of propensity for guitar virtuosity, sometimes repetitive structures, and melodies that don’t shine for variety. But it doesn't matter, it was great to wallow in the searing mud with Malacoda, Graffiacane, and Barbariccia.
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