Gojira from France was the first band out as Metallica visited the recently remodelled prison in Horsens on their Metallica album, or Black Album as it is also commonly known, tribute tour, a show that in common mouth was known as the State Prison Open Air.

No need for introductions it would seem as Joe Duplantier (vocals/guitar) and his band-mates entered the stage and threw themselves straight into the fray of their wild music without thought of the consequences!
Nope, no special antics, stage setup, or even a back-drop was to be seen, as the band took the gutsy move to rely solely on their music and performance skills. I say gutsy as they are still, even with four full-length albums, two DVD’s, and one more full-length in the pipeline, a rather newly discovered band on the scene, and diving directly into their music at a show such as this, where maybe not most but still a heck of a lot of people aren’t even metal fans as such, but just here to see Metallica, well, that takes some balls!

“The show starts now, give me something!”
- Joe Duplantier (vocalist/guitar)

Maybe the sheer amount of still-standing people was enough to intimidate the band, but for whatever reason, the band had a slow start sadly. Oh, I don’t mean the music, which by the way came off in my virgin ears as an energetic, aggressive form of metal with a distinctly modern sound to it (not in the nu, neu, new (or whatever the hell you’d like to call it) metal style, but with a current crunch if you catch my drift), but the members of the band were decidedly still in the first couple of songs…
This may just as well have been jet-lag or some other weird ailment for all I care, but I was happy to see that the band began to open up more, and especially began to kick ass with their performance bit as well, as the show went on.
This was not surprisingly reflected in the audience as well. Already at this time (Metallica was still a couple or so hours away) there was an insane amount of people for just a show, compared to a festival that is. Even so, the audience wasn’t crowded enough together to make it hard to move around at this time, unless you were heading for a beer that is of course.
Admittedly, it was only a few rows in the front that was seriously getting in on the action with headbanging and such, but when the music died down between songs, a much larger part of the audience was ready to salute these four Frenchmen.

Gojira is a band that in my presence have been raised to the skies and beyond, and from the 30 minutes of stage-time they here, I must admit that they didn’t really live up to what people were saying about them, but looking away from that for a minute, they actually did deliver a fully functional show.
Even though it didn’t knock me off my feet, I still walked away with a positive feeling about them, and got more curious about their upcoming show at Copenhell.