Gojira w/Code Orange & Car Bomb

Something angry was stirring in Glasgow on Friday night, and for once it didn’t include Buckfast. Car Bomb are one pissed off proposition, and they’re not designed to make you feel at home. Their disjointed and angular metal is hard to listen to at times and yet as they roar through a half hour set you can’t help but love them. These guys have been around for a while and with three albums under their belt are a perfect proposition for anyone that likes their music to attempt grievous bodily harm.

On any other night, they’d have been the band everyone went home talking about. Sadly for them, this wasn’t any other night. Code Orange have flown onto everyone’s radar with the daring Forever and the only question left is whether they can pull it off live. Well, they can. In fact, the set leans heavily on that album and is all the better for it. Tracks like ‘Forever’ are the musical equivalent of being choked to orgasm. It might not always be comfortable, but it still ends up feeling good.

What’s even more impressive is their ability to switch it up. To drop from punishing hardcore into slower, moodier pieces of rock and roll. ‘Bleeding In The Blur’ and ‘Ugly’ would both fit perfectly on the radio, and if there’s any justice, they’ll one day find their way there. This Code Orange lot are special, and if you aren’t paying attention, it’s time to do so now.

Any other band would struggle to follow those openers. Then again, any other band aren’t Gojira. If they weren’t such nice guys, they could quite easily stand on top of the mountain and laugh at everyone else’s feeble attempts to play heavy metal.

This has only been made more apparent by the release of Magma. The more stripped back approach of tracks like ‘Silvera’ and ‘The Shooting Star’ shines in the live environment as they fill the ABC with ease. It doesn’t stop them being relentlessly heavy, though, and ‘Backbone’ is a highlight.

Gojira are one of those bands that demand you throw superlatives at them. In this form, you could put them up against any metal band on the planet, and they’d take them to school. The fact that they had the balls to take out two groups as challenging as they did on this tour only adds to the respect you have to have for them. In years to come, this line-up of bands will be looked back at as one of the greats, and if their showing in Glasgow is anything to go by, they have earned that tag.