Voivod — Killing Technology( CD/DVD)
To give you a sense of the scope of this package, I’ll detail the precise contents. The booklet contains photographs, artworks, a bizarre review of the album from Kerrang! magazine, and a brief story of the album’s creation. The story, whilst informative and interesting, is also unavoidably touching - Piggy (the guitarist) sadly died in 2005, and his bandmates’ recollections of him, and their relationships, are extremely poignant. Lyrics are notably absent, which is perhaps the one flaw of the whole venture. The first CD features the album itself, remastered. I won’t lie, I can only compare this to my brother’s hand-me-down C90, which isn’t much of a comparison, but it sounds fine to me. The second CD contains the audio from a live show from September 1987. The DVD contains the audio from another 1987 gig, and five long videos of shows from the same year, as well as slideshows of photographs, and artwork. That’s a terrifying amount of material (the shortest of the live videos documents eight songs…), and I won’t even attempt to tackle it all here.
If you’re a fan, this is clearly essential - though I’ll admit that I don’t know how much of the ‘extra’ material is available elsewhere. If you’re not yet a fan, let me give you a brief description of Killing Technology. ‘It takes strength, guts and a lot of willpower to sit through a VoiVod record’, says the Kerrang! review, which is a statement my pre-converted self would have agreed with… Voivod are rightly considered ‘difficult’ in metal terms: odd timings, unusual rhythms, discordancy, and colours rarely used in thrash at the time. However, they’re never what I call ‘tech-y’.
There’s no mathematical stupidity, no difficulty for the sake of it. Voivod are unashamedly ‘prog’ - they might be playing a riff in 7/8, before switching to a waltzing section, but there remains a strong sense of song, and coherency. If it’s not an insult, they are always ‘musical’. In the midst of some labyrinthian riffing, they’ll suddenly launch a perfectly anthemic, sing-a-long chorus, featuring Snake’s snarling vocals. Perhaps the most obvious facet of their sound was Piggy’s guitar work. I think the easiest way of describing it, is to make the observation that whilst most thrash guitarists remained rooted to the lower end of the guitar’s range, venturing upwards for solos, Piggy used the guitar’s entire range - constantly. So much of his playing used the lighter strings; indeed, Killing Technology begins with a stabbing, frenetic riff, which is really a sped up archetypal funk riff. Combine this with Piggy’s frequent, and clinical, discordancy, and you can see that Voivod’s signature sound was full of a colour and movement that was unusual amongst their contemporaries. They were never the heaviest, or the fastest - though the foursome (completed by Blacky on bass, and Away on drums) spat out intricate riffs and changes at a fearsome speed - but they stood out, then and now. As well as this sonic idiosyncrasy, which is now reflected in the more abstract, math-y forms of black and death metal, Voivod also stood out visually and conceptually. Their artwork, which has always enraptured me, was drawn by Away, and is central to the band. Voivod have an entire sci-fi mythology mapped out (I won’t attempt to summarise it) and narrated it through their songs, lyrics, and artwork. Their art (even their handwritten lyric sheets) depicted a dystopian, sci-fi future, where mutated beings meshed with rusted, metal robotics; simultaneously primitive, and technologically advanced. Away’s scratchy, alien, dread-filled drawings remain iconic.
So, what are the other two discs like? Well, the second CD has Voivod slamming through a live set, in Montreal, 1987. It has 14 songs, from their career to that date, but naturally weighs very heavily on Killing Technology material. The sound quality is rough, but good, and it’s very much a warts-and-all recording, with stage banter (switching between French and English), and some sonic artefacts. The DVD, with its audio and video material, presents us with an obvious issue with the release: the package does indeed weigh heavily on the Killing Technology album (as you would expect). This means, in practical terms, a lot of repetition, song-wise. Of course, this is an archival, celebratory re-issue, a gathering of documentation; it was never meant to be listened to as a designed, coherent whole. (Though, clearly it attempts to encapsulate a certain time.) So, whilst the album proper (the first CD) might frequent your stereo often, the other discs contain a wealth of extra material to be dipped into, as different angles on the original album. ‘Wealth’ is perhaps an understatement, since (as described above), on top of the second audio CD, the DVD holds audio and video from six shows in 1987. As also stated above, these recordings each contain either 11, 12, or 13 songs (bar one with eight), and thus constitute albums in their own right. I won’t pretend that I’ve listened to or watched every minute on offer, but the audio recording here is rougher than that on the second CD (even cutting to one speaker), and also very nearly the same set-list. The video recordings are beautiful transmissions from a different era: grainy, shaky, zooming VHS, from one handheld camera. Two shows are recorded from the back of the venue, two from the side of the stage, and one from right up front; they all convey the sweat of the cramped stages. They’re also decidedly melancholy: this is a band in their prime, which I’ll never see, and I’m left with these washed out videos... They’re incredible. Like all the live material on the reissue, the set-lists contain only minor variations, but as I said, they’re all different views on the same thing. The artwork/photograph slideshows aren’t earth-shattering, but that’s the most minor grumble.
For hardened fans (accepting that I honestly don’t know how much of this material has been previously available) this reissue is the definition of the word ‘essential’.
Especially given the incredibly cheap price it is being sold at. Killing Technology itself remains amazing, and the ludicrous amount of surrounding material offers engaging, complimentary views on the album (the use of effects on Snake’s voice live, for example, develops the strange, sci-fi psychedelia that Voivod created). Fans of contemporary obtuse black and death metal should take the plunge too - history lessons never hurt anyone. I’m never really sure how Voivod are held these days; sometimes they seem to be revered, other times forgotten. (Confession: I only found out they were still going a few months ago!) However, this is a fine, deserved re-stating of why they are such an important band.