Big-Hearted Metal: Gojira

CARING ABOUT POLLUTED waters and garbage dumps doesn't seem very metal. But for the French band Gojira, environmental themes are as heavy as they come.

"On [2008's "The Way of All Flesh"] we have three songs that are really about human behavior toward nature," said guitarist-vocalist Joe Duplantier. "For example, the second song is called 'Toxic Garbage Island'; it's a patch in the Pacific Ocean that's twice the size of Texas that's created by a vortex of currents of plastic and waste. It's polluting the ocean really bad. It makes me sick."

You can hear the anger in Duplantier's growled and grunted vocals.

"When we rehearse and I scream into the microphone, it's something I really want to talk about," said the soft-spoken Duplantier. "I have no real answers or solutions, but we just have to face this truth first."

The band's name comes from the Latin alphabet spelling of Godzilla, and Gojira's sound is a monster mix of death metal and progressive rock, taking the heaviness of the former and fusing it with the expansiveness of the latter. Gojira's fourth album, "The Way of All Flesh" (Prosthetic), is also the band's most pulverizing, and Duplantier said, "It's the first time that we're satisfied with the production, with the sound itself. I think we are more mature than before and the music is more interesting."

With an opening tour slot for influential Swedish death-metal icons In Flames and a celebrated new album, everything seems to be going Gojira's way. But Duplantier is ever the serious artist.

"I'm always writing lyrics about the existence of the soul and the reasons why we're alive, extraterrestrial life, planets that might exist covered with oceans," he said. "But I turned 30 during the 'From Mars to Sirius' album [2005], and I started to think about my life as something that has an ending. ... [B]ut I think the soul will remain and the consciousness and the memory and the personality that we could call the soul, the spirit, will go on and stay alive."

But the planet, he worries, won't be so lucky.

» Ram's Head Live, 20 Market Place, Baltimore; with In Flames and 36 Crazyfists, Fri., Dec. 5, 7 p.m., $25; 410-244-8854.

Photo by Gabrielle Duplantier