As previously reported, a brand new VOIVOD song, entitled "The X-Stream", has been made available for streaming at MP3.com. The track comes off the Canadian pioneering metal band's upcoming album, "Katorz", due in June on The End Records in North America and Nuclear Blast Records in Europe.

VOIVOD recorded and mixed the album with producer Glen Robinson (ANNIHILATOR, TEA PARTY, GWAR) at Multisons studio in Montreal, Quebec, Canada and mastered the CD in New York.

The follow-up to 2003's "Voivod", "Katorz" is the first album in the band's 20-plus-year career that did not feature D'Amour working alongside his bandmembers in the studio.

In order to record "Katorz", drummer Michael "Away" Langevin, singer Denis "Snake" Belanger and bassist Jason "Jasonic" Newsted utilized all of the guitar parts that Piggy had recorded for the record on his laptop with ProTools before his death.

In a recent interview with Greg Prato of Billboard.com, Langevin had the following to say about the upcoming CD: "It came about in unfortunate circumstances, but the result is mind-blowing. Right before his departure, Denis explained to me that he had recorded all the tracks that we had been working on with Jason and Snake for the past two years. He had recorded that on his laptop with ProTools, and even though he would have preferred to re-do the whole thing in a real studio, there was a chance that we could use the tracks. We built the album based on the guitar tracks, which was difficult, because normally, we go the other way around — we start with the drums, and then add stuff on top. But it sounds amazing."

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They left yesterday, they're back Sunday.

Kool.

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Originally posted by Halaine Peau:
And as I write this, the guys are in Europe to do some promo for the next CD.

They left yesterday, they're back Sunday.

Kool.

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Will they be in Amsterdam??

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Originally posted by paul:
Will they be in Amsterdam??

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Honestly, I dunno.

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2006! 2006! 2006! 2006!

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Will they be in Amsterdam??

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There's a HUGE screen cap from the film of Piggy & Away here http://metalhistory.com/images/Voivod.jpg

I had a hard time concentrating on the movie as I just happenened to be sitting right behind Kerry King and was transfixed by the tattoo on his head.

Definitely check this flick out when it comes on dvd.

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Excerpt from Gaurdian:

Today, he finds himself in the unlikely position of becoming the world's leading heavy-metal cineaste. The first film he co-directed, wrote and produced, Metal: A Headbanger's Journey, has been touring the festivals to much acclaim. The editing suite has been hired to cut another documentary, this time about the life of Dennis "Piggy" d'Amour, the late guitarist of Canadian thrash metal band Voivod. Later this year, he will embark on a third documentary, this time about metal's popularity in unlikely corners of the globe. There is, he claims, a burgeoning black-metal scene in Indonesia: apparently, they can't get enough of bands called Abettor of Satan and Deformed Tartarus in Bandung. "The thing is," McFadyen sighs, "I'm not really into heavy metal. I was into indie rock from Britain at school. But for someone who's not into heavy metal, I seem to end up making a lot of films about it."
That he has is largely down to his schoolfriend Sam Dunn, a 30-year-old anthropologist, who is the unfailingly eager central character in Metal: A Headbanger's Journey. The film traces the genre's history through Dunn's lifelong obsession with Iron Maiden and Venom. He conducts an impressive array of interviews - "if the 12-year-old Sam knew he'd interview Bruce Dickinson, he'd be freaking out!" - explains the crucial difference between the first wave of black metal and the new wave of American metal, visits a vast metal festival in Wacken, Germany, ("Fuckin' awesome! Fuckin' awesome! I'm in fuckin' heaven, dude!"), and launches a robust defence of a music he believes has been "stereotyped, dismissed and condemned for 35 years". He only loses his natural ebullience when confronted with the leading lights of the Norwegian death-metal scene, including the fragrant Gaahl, lead singer of Gargamel, practising Satanist, and, it quickly becomes apparent, raving anti-semite. "He was actually pretty nice to us, although he's just been in prison for torturing a guy," says McFadyen, carefully. "He told us it was self-defence. We're not quite clear on how that works."

Metal: A Headbanger's Journey may be the most exhaustive and enthusiastic documentary ever made about its subject, but it's merely the latest entry in a vast list of heavy-metal related films. It's fair to say no genre of rock or pop has inspired quite as much celluloid. The 1980s metal band Judas Priest alone have inspired at least three films, including the legendary 1986 short Heavy Metal Parking Lot, which interviewed fans waiting for the band to perform live in Maryland; Dream Deceivers (about the famous court case brought against the band by the family of a teenager who alleged their songs had influenced his unsuccessful suicide bid); and the 2001 Mark Wahlberg film Rock Star, based on the true story of Tim "Ripper" Owens' bizarre progress from singer in a Judas Priest tribute band to singer in Judas Priest.

There are documentaries and mockumentaries, among them the most famous mockumentary of them all, This Is Spinal Tap. There are comedies and dramas. Metal is not the only musical genre to have fielded a musician-cum-film director, but it's certainly the only musical genre to have fielded a musician-cum-film director whose films anyone wanted to see, in the unlikely shape of Rob Zombie, self-styled "Hellbilly Deluxe" and director of successful horror flicks House of 1000 Corpses and The Devil's Rejects. Not only are there documentaries about heavy-metal fans, and horror films made by heavy-metal musicians, there are documentaries about heavy-metal fans trying to make horror films (Chris Smith's 1999 American Movie). Indeed, the sheer proliferation of metal films was to prove the biggest stumbling block in trying to get A Headbanger's Journey made. "It was an uphill battle all the way," says Dunn. "Most of the things that have been done on heavy metal have been a parody of something, so immediately when we approached artists with the idea, their reaction was that's what it was going to be, a mockumentary. We were swimming against the current."

Quite why heavy metal has developed such a symbiotic relationship with cinema is a matter of some debate. At one extreme, even the most diehard metalhead can see where the mockumentaries and parody films such as Spinal Tap and Wayne's World take their cue. "It's very over the top, it relies on the spectacle, so it's ripe for humour in some ways," says McFadyen. "I suspect if opera was a new genre now, there would be a lot of funny films made about that too."

In addition, though Dunn would doubtless disagree, most people view mocking metal as a guilt-free pleasure. Hip-hop may be equally lurid and over the top, but if you satirise it, you risk causing offence: you are, after all, mocking the authentic voice of a downtrodden racial minority. If you satirise metal and its fans, you are merely held to be mocking dorky white suburbanites, who in any case learned to laugh at themselves and their excesses long ago. As humourless and self-important as Metallica appear in Some Kind of Monster, it's difficult to imagine an artist from any other genre allowing a film to be made that holds such an unflattering light to them. "If you like metal, you kind of celebrate the ridiculousness of it," says Paul Brannigan, editor of British weekly metal magazine Kerrang! "There's a book out at the moment called Heavy Metal Thunder, full of excessive and extreme album sleeves that are all skulls and phallic swords and large-breasted ladies. I've got that book and I love it. People know that it's over the top and silly, that's part of the appeal. I interviewed Iron Maiden recently and they said, look, at the end of the day, we know we're men in tights, but we're having fun."

A romantic reading might suggest that metal shares a lot of traits with cinema, because metal is the only rock genre with cinema in its very DNA. If, like the makers of A Headbanger's Journey, you take Black Sabbath to be the first true metal band, then it's worth noting Ozzy Osbourne's oft-repeated story about how the Birmingham quartet came upon their doom-laden sound: rehearsing opposite a cinema showing a horror film, guitarist Tony Iommi musing aloud that if people paid to see scary movies, then why wouldn't they pay to listen to scary music? Like cinema, metal offers a form of escapism. A Headbanger's Journey notes that most of its major artists seem to hail from immeasurably dull parts of the world: Slipknot are shown bemoaning their home town of Des Moines at length, while Iommi explains that Black Sabbath come from Aston: "A shithole, basically." Just as cinema was the medium that pulls off remarkable transformations that could turn Bristolian Archie Leach into Cary Grant, so metal is the music that can turn the diminutive, balding Ronald James Pardovana from Portsmouth, New Hampshire into Dio, who, in the mid-1980s, would nightly climax his set by vanquishing a giant dragon called Denzil on stage.

The most prosaic reason for metal's popularity with film-makers may simply be its popularity. In the Recording Industry Association of America's list of the 100 bestselling albums of all time, it is easily the best-represented genre: almost half the records in the list are metal albums. As McFadyen and Dunn's forthcoming film hopes to make explicit, it is a musical phenomenon with genuine global reach. "24 Hour Party People was a cool film, but for all that music was lauded and hailed as cool and groundbreaking in England, it's still largely a cult Anglophile thing anywhere else around the globe," says Brannigan. "But make a film about the guy from the Judas Priest tribute band joining Judas Priest and it's got a real resonance with a huge swath of the population."

In addition, despite its vast commercial success, metal still has its aura of mystery. Hip-hop could claim an equivalent level of global popularity, but the culture that surrounds it has not merely infiltrated the mainstream, but almost completely consumed it: around the world, everything from high-street fashions to everyday language bears its influence, with the net result that most films about hip-hop, not least 50 Cent's hopeless recent effort Get Rich or Die Tryin' seem like strings of well-worn cliches. Metal, by contrast, sells in staggering quantities, yet still retains an air of impenetrability to anyone who isn't actually a metalhead. What kind of world is this, where a multi-platinum group can think it's a good idea to recruit a singer from its own tribute band? Why do they keep doing that devil's horns thing with their fingers? How can they take Gaahl or Dio or indeed Cannibal Corpse's Alex Webster - the author of Meat Hook Sodomy and Frantic Disembowelment, who, on the evidence of his brief interview in A Headbanger's Journey, sounds remarkably like George W Bush when he opens his mouth - seriously?

Perhaps more than any other genre, metal offers a vast and endlessly surprising world for film-makers to explore. Certainly, McFadyen will happily testify to his continuing astonishment. "I went to these concerts with Sam," he says, "and, you know, despite the fact that it looks like a biker's convention and everyone's wearing black and crucifixes, the atmosphere is much closer to what you might have expected Woodstock to be. It's really friendly. Metal's a real community." And he goes back to editing his film about Piggy from Voivod.

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Originally posted by neutronboy2000:
I checked a review of this movie title in a local paper and of course,they gave it a shitty review(mainstream idiots!). This movie is opening here in H-Town at LANDMARK OAKS THEATRE(RIVER OAKS-for any Houston-area Vodheads who are reading this)tonight and Saturday at midnight!!! Holy shit,I'll catch the Saturday show if I can't get into the Friday show, and of course I'll be wearing a Voivod shirt...I'll give a review on Sun or early next week.....AAARGGHHHH...FOR BLOOD AND DEATH WE SCREAM!!!!!

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quote:

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Originally posted by Mezcalhead:

Excerpt from Gaurdian:

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'The Guardian' is a lefty broadsheet in the UK notorious for its often hilarious typos.

I'd like to think that Mez is being bitingly ironic here but he prolly ain't.

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