GOJIRA, The Safety Fire, Frantic Empire @Academy 2 26/6/12

It’s hot in the Academy 2 tonight. Very hot in fact. And it’s packed. The show is all but sold out, but it makes for a decent atmosphere. Also rather than the usual turn-up-just-the-main-band attitude, the crowd are here early.

Wolverhampton thrashers Frantic Empire find themselves are the main beneficiaries of this and are able, this evening, to strut their stuff to hundreds of people.

Actually, calling them thrashers is a little simplistic, given that they are not ever going to part of the thrash revival as such, but rather they take thrash as a starting point and add something a little more contemporary, so that they are almost a trad-metal take on groove metal. “Lords Lie” ticks the right boxes and they are very much worth checking out.

The Safety Fire have been garnering rave reviews recently for their debut full-length effort “Grind The Ocean” and its easy to see why the metal press is liking them so much. Billing themselves as Prog Metal, they are definitely from the Periphery/Djent end of the genre rather than the Dream Theater/Symphony X one.

The fantastically named Sean McWeeney on vocals is the bands star turn, while the twin guitar-guitar duo Dez Nagle and Joaquin Ardiles come to the fore on tracks like “Circassian Beauties.” The band end their brief half hour set with catchy single “Huge Hammers” and appear set fair to be headlining venues like this themselves in the near future.

French titans Gojira’s rise to doing just that has been largely due to the fact they have excellent songs rather being part of a “scene”. Perhaps the world was slow to catch on at first – and lets be honest France hardly trips off the tongue when thinking of metal hotbeds -   but that is definitely not the case any longer.

If the 2008 album “The Way of All Flesh” was good, then “L’Enfant Savauge” – released this very week - is even better and the band are rising fast. Indeed they arrive on stage and rip through “Space Time” from their first album as Gojira, "Terra Incognita", as if they eager to captailise on their new found fame.

The 70-minute set is pretty much evenly divided from the aforementioned “…Incognita” and “….”Flesh” records, as well as three songs from the new album and a trio from the monstrously heavy “From Mars To Sirius” CD and showcases the bands prodigious abilities both as songwriters and musicians.

Led by the Duplantier brothers – Joe on vocals and Mario on drums – the band is riding on the crest of a creative wave right now. New tracks “Explosia” and “The Axe” are fine affairs sitting easily alongside set closer “Vacuity” one of the stand out moments on “The Way of All Flesh.” They are soon back for an encore with puts together “Toxic Garbage Island” together with current single and new albums title track.

The band, who are greeted like heroes throughout, seem genuinely touched at the reception and promise to be back before Christmas to play more new songs.

When they do, if its anything like as good as this it will be one of the gigs of the year, because tonight Gojira were truly remarkable.