Possessed

Well, this is already a masterful improvement for such demo. When you take that into account, I also have to mention the cool album cover, which solidifies this release even more so. That’s a bit of a stretch, but the band improved on all the fundamentals. The production and mix are solid, and all the instruments sound amazing. For nearly 20 minutes, you get four awesome songs and a closing instrumental track to compensate for some leftover atmosphere from the first demo. However, it’s far from an original release. There’s a clear influence from bands such as Death and Suffocation (which I can’t recall the amount of times I had to mention these two), as well as the European-towards-Swedish death metal scene.

That 50-second intro for the first song was pointless, taken from some horror film, I presume. When you take that out of the equation, you look at a pretty simple-structured, yet powerful song to showcase all the improvements. The song itself is slower than expected and obviously towards the groovier side of the music. However, the hard-hitting power chords and the double bass work with the cymbals reminiscence Death‘s Human in the good way. And as I already mentioned the Suffocation influence, the following song proceeds with that thought, with an-almost slow but slammy intro. The rest of the songs follow similar patterns, nonetheless enjoyable and addictive.

The meaning of the word ‘groove’, combined with the concept of ‘death metal’ can sound like an oxymoron in a way, or vague. I don’t necessarily deem the meaning all too correlated with the genre, even though I use it so damn frequently. I’m also not trying to imply this is death/groove metal. Like I said, it’s vague. Anything can sound groovy, especially how one hears it in the genre, and the band heavily emphasis on the groove for the music way back when, and they succeeded in that respect. So it’s fascinating how their evolution expanded over the years. That element befits their music.

Considering the lack of attention (or rather the lack of reviews) and the decent average rating for Gojira‘s debut record on the site, perhaps the demos will share the same quality. Of course, I shouldn’t base this as such. For better or worse, this is the end of an era, since this is pretty much the conclusion of the prototype Gojira with two impressive demos. I’m certain you’ll enjoy all the tracks equally, so no actual favorites.