Recap Gojira at Logan Square Auditorium 

Midway through Gojira's hour-plus set Sunday night at Logan Square Auditorium, vocalist and guitarist Joe Duplantier teased, "In New York, the mosh pit was incredible. Here, it is weird. In France, it is even better. You must be asleep!" Oh, that insatiable French wit. He was probably just joking, but he had a point: Turnout for the melodic death metal band's Chicago stop was a little underwhelming, possibly because it was Mother's Day. But Duplantier pointed out another impressive occasion for the day: This show was the band's 500th in their four-album, 12-year history.

Opening with "Oroborus," the first track from the group's 2008 brain-fuck, The Way Of All Flesh, Gojira proved they could tackle the complex riffs on its albums with ease in a live setting. It was also painfully clear that drummer Mario Duplantier was getting out whatever frustrations that life has dealt him behind his kit, hitting with a ferocity usually reserved for groups with slower and less-tangled rhythms. Maybe he was feeding off the bizarre images that were partially projected onto him and the screen behind him, but Duplantier started and ended playing with the same furor, showing no signs of fatigue and even played a short, tribal drum solo while the other three members tuned their instruments. Bassist Jean-Michel Labadie and second guitarist Christian Andreu mostly stayed put at stage left and right, respectively, but occasionally uprooted themselves and swung their hair around on opposite sides of the stage or on the drum riser. Mainly, they seemed focused and banging out the songs accurately and vehemently. Hey, someone has to dazzle the apparently sleepy crowd.

The Logan Square Auditorium is basically a giant box. With a crowd that barely filled half the floor, the drums dominated the mix, bouncing around the room and leaving a lot of the guitar and bass trying to catch up, volume-wise, for all three bands on the bill. Gojira's music is very much riff-based, so when songs like "From the Sky," off 2005's From Mars To Sirius, or the 10-minute "The Art Of Dying" ventured into more complex and less bottom-heavy parts, the notes seemed to just vanish into the air above the meager crowd's upraised devil horns.

The bodies attached to those upraised horns tried to keep the energy level as high as Gojira's, but even with only three bands on the bill, it was still the end of the weekend, Mother's Day, and hard to stay excited when there was so much floor visible. Those in attendance were a mixture of old-school fans, cheering every song no matter the album; others were doing shots of Jägermeister, adjusting their baseball caps, and possibly beginning to venture deeper into heavy, progressive music due to Mastodon's great success and the group's recent great show at the Metro. Either way, fans were there supporting a French death metal band, which is the most important factor.

Georgia-based band The Chariot was the middle band of the show, a screaming, Christian-hardcore band touring in support of its new album, Wars And Rumors Of Wars, and definitely appealed more to the younger members of the audience still going through heavy-music puberty. Openers Car Bomb played a handful of new tracks alongside a number of songs from its art-grind masterpiece, 2007's Centralia. The least linear of the three bands on the bill, Car Bomb's eccentric-but-very-aggressive style caught some early-arrivers off guard, both luring them in and blowing them away with their odd sound.

Gojira and its two opening bands acted as the perfect tour package: aggressive, but all cut from slightly different, dark-colored cloths.