Voivod-Post Society (2016)

Voivod-Post Society (2016)

By: Ghost Writer

Sheer power, that's what Canada's Voivod is all about, a big favorite of mine,  and after Rush, possibly the best band in Trudeau's country, for more than 3 decades, this guys have been producing some of the best heavy music coming from the north, creating forward thinking music, just like Rush, and spawning a school of weird sounding, highly technical thrash metal of high quality, sometimes leaning towards psychedelic pop, and others towards traditional punk, blending quite interest influences going from Australia's mighty punk rockers The Saints, Britain's psychedelic pride, Pink Floyd, and anything goes virulent hardcore punks The Dead Kennedys.

With a great title like Post Society, you know that Voivod more or less is following his tradition of issuing conceptual albums depicting society's evolution, this time is not the exception, with a title track featuring opening Lemmy/The Damned like bass lines, and Snake's always effective vocals, Voivod is coming again as a totally lethal metal band, highly evolutionary, extracting the essence from both metal and punk in a brilliant way developing a fluid sound still all their own.

Post Society is a short and intense record, a matter of quality over quantity, and in a world obsessed with quantity, this record is a totally revolutionary one, featuring dizzying tempos, the darkness sounds learned from Gothic bands like Bauhaus and guitars closer to the school of free jazz rather than from typical heavy metal.

Beastly guitars show up at the mystical song named Forever Mountain, where the band is quick to introduce chopped guitars along with complex jazz like drumming and a deep resounding bass, while Snake's voices guide us thru some really dark passages, and when it seems that the band is going to give us a chance to catch a breath, Fall arrives just like a nuclear band, a powerful and toxic waltz of menacing proportions.

Within the Voivod mythology, covering a great song by a legendary prog band has sort of becoming another tradition, damn, we are talking about traditions in Canada with the conservative Harper out of the office? Well yes, and here is the turn of the mighty Hawkwind, the classic Silver Machine reinvented here by the band, not exactly perfect, but considering the recent death of the great Lemmy Kilmister, a key member of that band, this is a quite endearing homage to the metal legends and his big legacy, ending a short but overwhelming record that leave us all waiting for more.