You lucky bastards, i have typed the whole thing out for you....
Here it comes, my fingers hurt...Since first coming together in Jonquiere, Quebec almost 25 years ago, Voivod have been turning heads in the metal world with remarkable regularity. Their first two albums [1984's War and Pain and 1986's RRROOOAAARRR!!!] being loud, ugly genuflections at the altar of Discharge, Motörhead and Venom, the band's first foray into uncharted musical territory came with 1987's Killing Technology. This third LP not only significantly tightened Voivod's attack, but also added to the equation a prominent progressive rock influence that was rare in metal, along with the use of harmonic dissonance and minor chords, which were not merely rare in the genre but altogether unheard-of. The unprecedented experimentation continued on 1988's Dimension Hatröss and 1989's landmark major label debut Nothingface. This trio of albums, each more bizarre and experimental than the last, not only gave Voivod permanent notoriety in the metal world, but also launched them decades ahead of the curve for innovation within the genre. Even in 2006, only a small fraction of metal bands in general have caught up with Voivod's adventurousness, while the band's thrash peers have been left in the dust virtually permanently. Simply put, there has never been a metal band more innovative than Voivod.
The mad scientist at the heart of the band's forays into the weird was guitarist Denis 'Piggy' D'Amour, who consistently concocted riffs that broke down people's preconceived notions of what metal riffs can and should sound like. Piggy's arrangements effectively painted vivid soundscapes of a bleak, dystopian, chaotic, technocratic future to match the band's recurring lyrical themes. The sounds D'Amour's guitar produced gave Voivod a truly unique identity and a reputation as a mind-bending and forward-thinking band. So it was no surprise that the metal world felt as if it had lost one of its greatest heroes when D'Amour succumbed to colo-rectal cancer on August 26th of 2005 at the age of 45.
"We were at home, and we got a call from his closest friend and his girlfriend. It was about one hour after we had left his hospital room," drummer Michel 'Away' Langevin recalls the moment he learned of Piggy's death, "We could tell that it was very close to the end and we wanted to give his family a chance to be alone. So after we had left the room, only his mother, father and girlfriend were there. Needless to say, I didn't sleep that night."
Vocalist Denis 'Snake' Belanger remembers receiving a phone call at about 7 in the morning, and immediately knowing, before picking it up, what the call was about. "It was my mother, telling me that Piggy had passed away. I remember sitting there, confused for about an hour after hanging up, and then I was in sort of a fog for the rest of the day, I couldn't really talk or anything."
Voivod's newest album, Katorz, due for a July 25th release through The End Records in North America, was completed in the months immediately following D'Amour's passing. The band had written approximately two dozen songs in the time since the 2003 release of their self-titled record, which marked the return of Snake as the band's vocalist, and the introduction of Newsted, who had just ended fifteen-year stint in Metallica into the fold. It was during the creation of this material that D'Amour was diagnosed with the cancer - which afflicts 131,000 people each year in the U.S. alone, killing nearly half of its victims . During his treatment for the disease, the guitarist took time to record the riffs he had written over the previous two years on his laptop, using Avid Audio's Pro Tools, expecting the band to complete the project despite the circumstances. Even in D'Amour's final days, the future of Voivod was on his mind.
"We had, of course, deeper conversations that were more personal," recounts Langevin, "but we actually spent a lot of time during the summer of 2005, while Piggy was going back and forth into the hospital, discussing the project and how to make sure that the labels with which we had signed would get a product to release and promote. We had signed those deals prior to Piggy being taken ill, so Piggy being respectful as always, wanted to fulfill those contracts. There were a lot of discussions about the fact that we might be able to use what was on the laptop and stuff. That was at the very end, when we realized that Piggy couldn't be with us in the studio anymore. We started thinking about alternate ways of doing it, but it was only when we actually heard the tracks he had recorded that we knew we had something to work with."
Piggy's absence from the studio during the production process had a clear impact on the manner in which it proceeded. The band had recruited Glen Robinson, who had also engineered the seminal Nothingface record, to oversee the process, and while the final product sounds no less natural than any album created with all involved parties present at once, getting it to sound that way posed a major challenge. "It was certainly a different approach," elaborates Belanger, "We had the bass tracks, but we had to re-amp the guitars, re-record the drums and vocals. It was not the usual process. It was quite a task for Michel to play drums over the existing tracks, but he managed to do it pretty well. The whole session was really strange, because Piggy had always been there, taking care of everything throughout the recording process. But Glen helped us a lot. We had known Glen for a while and he was really into the project, trying to do the best he could with what we had, just in terms of retouching it, just making sure that the guitar tracks were good and loud enough, and everything else. So he was a great source of support to us, both technically and emotionally."
Away added further praise for Robinson, noting, "The fact that we recorded all our parts in different studios, at different times made things so difficult for Glen. He had the task of making the record sound like we were all in the same room, and I feel like he achieved that. He has my respect."
In terms of Voivod’s future, there is no plan for the band to permanently replace Piggy, nor will there be a tour in support of the new album with a fill-in guitarist in D’Amour’s spot. However, the band does have plans for a memorial/benefit concert in Montréal this coming fall as a tribute to the guitarist, which will likely be filmed for a DVD release with a portion of proceeds going towards colon cancer awareness and research programs. “We have just begun to organize the festival,” notes Langevin, “and nothing is 100% confirmed. But we would obviously like to invite guitar players who loved Piggy and whom Piggy loved, and people who have been championing Voivod for a while - Andreas [Kisser] from Sepultura, Dave Grohl [Foo Fighters, Probot, ex-Nirvana], Alex Lifeson [Rush] - people like that. It will all depend on their schedule, but it will be great to do that. We are trying to hold it in November of this year.”
The ten tracks on Katorz, as previously noted, were written over a two-year span from 2003 to 2005, in addition to thirteen other songs that will likely appear on a future release. The band had rehearsed all the tracks and were ready to go into the studio in early 2005, but were forced to postpone all work on the recording due to the guitarist's illness. It was not until January of this year that the band managed to finally complete the record. Each of the songs had been thoroughly rehearsed and demoed by the band prior to D'Amour's passing - a fact that likely saved the project from having to be scrapped.
Musically, Katorz is a continuation of the sound Voivod had been exploring for the previous three albums that featured Belanger on vocals [dating back to 1991's Angel Rat]. Energetic, hooky metal that pays equal tribute to the band’s punk and prog-rock roots, while maintaining the identity that Voivod forged for themselves earlier in their career through the use of strange and alien guitar sounds.
Lyrically, the album also builds on past successes, touching on themes of government and industrial corruption, environmental degradation, and an increasingly bleak outlook for the future that the band has been writing about dating all the way back to the Killing Technology record. But in many ways, Katorz is Voivod’s most socially conscious album, because while songs like “Chaosmöngers” and “Order of the Blackguards” dealt with dystopian scenarios as problems of a fictional future, in 2006 the lyrics to these 2-decade-old tracks ring both true and timely, as do those of new songs like “Dognation,” “Mr. Clean,” and “Odds & Frauds.”
“I think right now there really is an emergency for the planet, with what’s going on in the world,” explains Belanger, who writes most of the band’s verses, “I feel like we need to be more direct [now] with people, but these are obviously the same kinds of problems that we talked about on albums like Killing Tech and Dimension Hatröss, I think Voivod always tried to represent the reality in a different context - the Voivod world that we created - but this time I was a little less poetic and used less sci-fi imagery because I wanted things to be more politically engaged.
“You can make a connection between the older songs and stuff like ‘Mr. Clean’ which is about a kind of manipulation, as well. ‘The Getaway’ is about the war in Iraq. ‘Odds and Frauds’ is about government scams that could definitely happen here in Canada, as well as all over the world. You can see that just by watching the news - there’s all kinds of confirmation of that belief. That attitude in governments that they can make decisions, take your money and do whatever they want with it, in their own interest. And when that happens, it pisses me off and I want to say something about it.”
Adds Langevin, “Twenty years down the road from when we talked about all of these things on the early albums, the planet is in even worse shape than we were expecting. Not just the environment, but the threat of nuclear war that looms over us. It’s not that we’re repeating ourselves, but rather history repeating itself all the time. And the situation gets more urgent every year, especially in terms of the destruction of the environment. We can no longer be thinking about what’s gonna happen fifty or seventy-five years down the line, but if we’re gonna last the next thirty years.”
The band’s concern for the future of the planet stems, in many ways, from what they have witnessed firsthand, living in Quebec where the cold season has been getting shorter and warmer with each passing year since the turn of the century, and trees are appearing in areas that were once tundra. When the phenomenon of polar bears in Arctic regions of Canada and Alaska turning to cannibalism from lack of food caused by the shortening of cold seasons made international news just this month , the band saw it as a sign of the increasing uncertainty with which the planet’s future is to be viewed because of the effects of climate change. “If [polar bears] are going,” Belanger muses, ”then other species will also disappear. It’s a chain reaction and that’s scary. Nobody can tell what’s going to happen. Scientists can expect many scenarios, but nobody has any idea about the long-term effects and what species will be affected.”
Though none of the band members are directly involved in politics, Voivod subscribe to the idea that musicians and artists can have an impact on people’s beliefs, and try to take advantage of that fact - an attitude that stems from a lack of faith in political leadership that has long been reflected in the band’s lyrics. “Our mission,” Langevin explains, “is to talk about it in our music and try to make people who listen more aware of it. If there’s a spark that gets younger people to wake up to certain facts, that’s good. But on the other hand, we’re not activists. All we can really do as musicians is talk about our fears in our songs.” Adds Belanger, “It’s just a matter of making people concerned about things. I wish I had the time and resources to address these issues myself, but unfortunately I don’t. I’m just a singer, and that’s my tool - my soapbox - and that’s how I can help these causes.”
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posted June 30, 2006 17:11
posted July 01, 2006 04:15
