Lovingly pinched from Metal Review: With a setlist made up of primarily pre-90s Voivod, it’s hard not to get sentimental. So it’s off to the elementary school daze for a momentary lapse… Summer vacation 1988, Chicago, 90º Fahrenheit in the shade. We walked the streets armed with spray paint, beer, plans to kiss the girls from the next grade up, and a Dimension Hatross cassette. Yep, you got it… the essentials.
Voivod had been carving out their iconic, genre-defying bastardization of metal and punk for seven years prior to the moment that I would defile someone’s daughter and the property of the city in the same twelve-hour period, with ‘Chaosmongers’ my soundtrack to every move made. But the way I see it, Voivod was guilty of larger crimes. They rode in from far far away… Another galaxy? No. Canada. But it sounded like light years, and when they landed they knifed our kiddish ideas of what progressive thrash metal and punk intertwined could be at a time when that sort of tangle was rarely approached. They tore hard at the Metal moral fabric, and they won. My world was never the same. Goddamn it, our world was never the same.
This made 2005 all the more unbearable. Did you feel the Earth stand still when guitarist Denis D’Amour, a.k.a. Piggy, lost his battle with colon cancer? I did. Even the universe thought it impossible for Voivod to carry on in his absence. After all, he played those strings like he was guiding a puppet the size of a planet. Now how many of us are convinced that at least a speck of Denis’ light was reincarnated into current guitarist – and Martyr mastermind – Daniel Mongrain… Probably only myself and a handful of other Voivod weirdos. But the dude can mimic Piggy’s style to the point that it’s actually a bit creepy.
And to top it off with a chill down the spine, he actually looks a tad bit like him, too. Warriors Of Ice is now the second official release of live material with Daniel in place of the late, great Mr. D’Amour, as well as that of Jean-Yves Theriault, the original ‘Vod bassist that took a seventeen-year hiatus and officially re-joined in 2008. For latecomers to this scene who thought that Jason Newsted was the be-all-end-all when he did his short stint, you need only hear this intro to ‘Overreaction; to know that there can be only one, and when it wasn’t this one, the stars in Voivod’s psychotic multiverse were not aligned. Well, they are now back in their right place.
And yes, you’d read correctly: “Primarily pre-90s Voivod”. In your heart of hearts you know that I had you at hello. But if not for the stellar setlist, then consider this an essential because Warriors is presented as it should be, with clarity, but sans the cosmetics that sometimes curse a live recording and reduce it to another studio session; it’s gritty in the best possible way, and it has a pulse, obviously felt throughout the crowd on this particular evening as well.
Continue reading: Review of Voivod – Warriors of Ice | Metal Review.
Tags: Album of the day, Away, Blacky, Chewy, Daniel Mongrain, Denis Bélanger, Denis D'Amour, Indica records, Jean-Yves Thériault, Metal Review, Michel Langevin, Sasha Horn, Snake, Sonic Unyon Metal, voivod, Warriors Of Ice
This entry was posted on Thursday, July 7th, 2011 at 1:57 pm and is filed under 2011, Album of the Day, Roadburn Recommended . You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
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