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Before reviewing the new Voivod record, I revisited its back catalogue. Angel Rat and The Outer Limits are tremendously underrated. I have owned both, but never truly appreciated them until now. Perhaps I bought into the conventional wisdom of “first x albums good, everything later bad.” Perhaps my ears just weren’t ready. Voivod was always ahead of its time.
One song from The Outer Limits felled me this time around. “Le Pont Noir” – what an epic! It opens with naked clean guitar and rare rimshots by drummer Away. Singer Snake tells an eerie tale of going down to a bridge, not knowing what he’ll find. (See lyrics here.)
I’m going to the bridge tonight
Venus shines so ever bright
Deep in the woods under the stars
How did I come to get this far?
Have this feeling…what will I find
Around the corner of my mind?< />
At 1:35 comes a skull-shattering mindfuck of a harmony. Is guitarist Piggy using a harmonizer, or is he twisting this tapestry by hand? Sharps and flats spiral upwards, as Snake emits an otherworldly wail. On Crack the Skye, Mastodon attempted similar abstraction, but with half the class. This presentation is bare and huge – less is more.
The song’s latter half is a dodgy funk bit. What were these white boys thinking? But the song rights itself. First a hectic doubletime, then an abyssal halftime, then the original clean guitar, returning the way it came. In five minutes and 43 seconds, one has traversed hours. If not for the next track, they could last forever.
Cosmo, have you ever listened to Thought Industry? I bet you’d like ‘em.
the older i get the more i really really like voivod. i listen to them way more now than i did as a teen in the 80s
I think Phobos is the most pyschedelic and underrated album in the entire Voivod catalog. That had Eric Wagner of Trouble on vocals. They even capped off the album with the best cover of King Crimson’s 21st Century Schizoid Man ever.
I second the thought industry suggestion and strangely not so much the early technothrash – there’s a point where it gets too jarring even for me – but the latter more melancholic material. Excellent write-up, I played the song to see what you were talking about. It seems I haven’t appreciated this record as much as I should either.
Hehe god though the funkish break
P.S. It’s an overdubbed guitar, not a harmony pedal.
bacon: I think Phobos is alright too. Eric Wagner was never in Voivod. That was Eric Forrest, also on Negatron and that other one I think.
I don’t know Thought Industry, though I admit what I’ve heard on the fan MySpace I have absolutely hated.
I normally don’t like acoustic guitars in metal, “skittery” metal, or technothrash. What makes Thought Industry RIYL Voivod? The only similarity I can hear is that they’re both proggy.
Yes, Eric Forrest, not Wagner, was in Voivod. However, Snake and Wagner were both on that Probot album.
Voivod were a technothrash band for a couple of years there but I’ll agree that doesn’t say much because they didn’t sound like anyone else in this shortlived idiom. You don’t like Watchtower, Mekong Delta, Coroner or Metallica’s And Justice For All?
Skittery? hah that’s Thought Industry in a word. They’re a very strange band with a lot of fluctuation in style. To understand where they headed off to you’d have to listen to what they started off as, I guess. What you listened to probably was from the latter period and they stopped being even tangentially metal since what, 1996?
They’re important because they were effectively avant-garde (this term is thrown around a lot when it doesn’t fit, I feel). You’ll be able to see with the benefit of hindsight how they predated a lot of trends in 90’s metal by a good 2-3 years and never stayed in one spot for too long to lose that quality. They did the radiohead-in-metal thing before any metalhead I knew listened to, much less aknowledged Radiohead, for example.
The songwriting is purposefully strange, I hesitate to go into theories as to why, I honestly can’t make heads nor tails of even their first album ‘Songs For Insects’ and I’ve had that for over a decade. They’re more an interesting band than an enjoyable band, though when they do the melancholic thing later on they can be profoundly effective.
They’re similar to Voivod in terms of trajectory (at least up to ‘The Outer Limits’) though compared to Voivod, Thought Industry moved in warp speed. Voivod took about one record to find a style and another to perfect it and then they moved on. Thought Industry are done with technothrash (mind you, in 1992) by the fifth song on their first album.
The gamble in devoting time to a band like Thought Industry is that this weird and warped music that might initially feel extremely off-putting will suddenly after many listens at different sceneries click and make sense and become indispensable to you on a level more essential than music that grabs you from first listen. This is my experience with Nothingface, now one of my favorite records. At first I thought it was an empty, weird and uncatchy mess of riff salad and nonsensical lyrics, oh and bad singing. Thought Industry are all these things too but potentially they could be more.
Don’t judge from Myspace. Listen to a record.
Nice, Helm! (You ever think about starting a blog?) I guess I got into Thought Industry and Voivod around the same time in my life (‘92?) and tend to associate the two more than one might otherwise. By that time, Voivod was well past thrash, and I didn’t even really think of TI as a thrash band. At any rate, I appreciate TI more now than I did back then. (Of course, back then I was listening to Helmet and Pantera, so wtf did I know, right?) I think most fans of Voivod, Coroner, Anacrusis, etc, would at least appreciate TI, if not love them.
I second the “Helm should start a blog” your posts in response to both Aversionline, IO and Metal Inquisition articles are always really interesting and full of insight. Hell, sometimes even better than the article you’re commenting on!.
And I guess i’ll be the one different voice here and say that for me Voivod was at the top of their game with Dimension Hattross, it was the first one I heard from them but after owning both Angel Rat and Outer Limits it’s still my favorite and for me it was their best mesh of Snake’s weird but fitting vocals and Piggy’s guitar wizardry. For me Voivod is one of those “a group of great songs I like but not a really definite album” kind of band.
I run a blog about my comics and visual art stuff where I ramble to great degree so I don't think I have the time to maintain a second blog about HM. I know I'm sorta abusing the comment-space here. I don't think I ever posted at Aversionline… perhaps you're thinking of The Left Hand Path? I've stopped reading & commenting there because I'm not interested in bile about this scene or that scene at all. And I have long since left Metal Inquisition which is ran by a bunch of self-loathing posers. Anyway, I'm sorry about rambling so much in the comments, Cosmo. Brevity is appreciated in commentspaces and I've never gotten the hang of being brief. Watch me.
I started with Voivod with Nothingface and then simultaneously moved backwards and forwards trying to understand why that record sucked that much. I found the earlier motorhead filth thrash to at least be energetic and on edge (as opposed to how off the edge Nothingface was) if not really enjoyable and I found the latter material to be effective pop music or (at the time I think Phobos had just come out) what metalheads dismissively called 'hardcore' (imagine a face sneer when the word is said).
Now I love most of their stuff. I don't spin War and Pain or RRROOOAAARRR very often but they do also suit some moods in a way little else does. It's great for me because it's like aliens from another dimension fell on the metal scene circa 1980 and they thought they were playing straight up normal thrash and heavy but their material is so odd and at times unparsable.
With Killing Technology, Hattross (just listening to Psychic Vacuum… that riff makes no sense at all!)and then finally Nothingface, Voivod comes to be self-aware about how strange they are and consciously push the promise of the earlier material. That's my favorite stuff by far.
By Angel Rat and Outer Limits they are realizing that they can be great 'normal' songwriters too and Snake writes his best – well, least alienating – lyrics. I should really revisit these records though because as Cosmo wrote about there's a lot of nuances that one can miss.
Negatron and Phobos aren't my favorite material but I've grown to appreciate their textural qualities. Sadly Forrest for me hasn't the charisma needed to inject interest in what is at times very homogeneous material.
I am afraid the material after Snake's return doesn't do it for me because it seems to be basic dad metal. The homogeneity of Negatron/Phobos, the intentional earthliness of Outer Limits but without anything challenging or weird going on. But I'll listen to this material again soon because the beauty might be hidden.
I still don’t like it, not in the context of liking Voivod anyway. Still, you have a unique talent of getting me to listen to stuff I’d otherwise ignore.
An interesting looking Voivod-related thing here: a live collaboration between Michel Langevin (Away) and Martin Tetreault. Tetreault does cool noisy turntable-based stuff (not as in scratching, but more in using turntables to produce noise/experimental/improvisational/whatever you want to call it music) and he’s been great the times I’ve seen him playing with other people. I won’t be able to make it to that show, but I imagine that it will be recorded and hopefully made available.
I’ll third the “Helm should start a blog” suggestion.
Wow, Away at Mutek! Worlds collide. I’ll tell my friends who are going to check it out.
So what do you think of Infini? Relapse has my $25 for the tshirt/cd pre-order and I’m really looking forward to hearing it. Love your writing!
Thanks for the kind word. I like Infini the best out of the Jason Newsted years, though I still prefer the classic stuff. I think Infini is a good swansong for Voivod, though.