After pretty unexciting L'Enfant Sauvage, Gojira are back with their newest offering called Magma. The first notable thing you’ll notice is a massive change of pace on the opener, The Shooting Star. It looks like the guys from the band decided to record the album while smoking a good chunk of hash. Fortunately, the album picks up the pace going forward, with two excellent pieces, Silvera, and The Cell. The band incorporates much fewer death elements than on previous albums; the sound is thicker, filled with chugging riffs, progressive drumming, and interesting lyrics. Magma can be described as a prog record with some groove, death, and djent constituents.
At least the album isn’t uninspired like their previous effort. Songs are filled with interesting bridges, vocal style switches, incredible drumming and overall feel of continuity. After the first three songs, Magma becomes chillout again, but unlike The Shooting Star, Magma (title song) is an interesting piece, its structure very complex, giving the listener a calming experience, making its almost seven minutes span feel almost too short.
The album has flat parts. Low Lands sounds bland, detached from the rest of the record like it was included just because Magma needed a couple more songs. And what to say about Liberation, a three and a half minute long outro, which can without problems be deleted from the album completely, the song is absolutely unnecessary and just plain bad.
Overall, Magma is a solid record on its own, but when compared to monoliths that are From Mars To Sirius and The Way Of All Flesh, Magma is just a slightly above average record. There are some cool songs on it, especially Silvera, The Cell, Magma and Only Pain, but the rest of the album can’t keep with the quality of those songs.
Magma lasts less than 44 minutes, by far the shortest album Gojira ever released, and if we don’t count Yellow Stone and Liberation, we’re left with less than forty minutes of music. Pretty thin for Gojira standards. But it is better this way, at least there are some excellent songs that will stay on your playlist for a long time. I still want to recommend it to all metal aficionados. Although this isn’t Gojira we remember from their glory days, Magma is decent enough to be listened to at least a couple of times.
