Retro Raunch Revisit

My favourite album of all time, DH is VOIVOD's 4th album which was an inventive futuristic concept of post-apocalyptic fusion that took the band's previous raw nuclear bulldozer thrash/speed metal into a new cosmic territory. It was an exploration of far-off dystopian nether-realities in hyperspace while navigating twisted sci-fi technology. The otherworldy cyber lyrics were an eerie social narrative of oppression, class warfare & tyranny, and the dynamic, clean & complicated excellent highly progressive music was uneasy & turbulent with flawless stop-start precision. It blended perfectly with the cold spectral aura of a biomechanical stream-of-conciousness further drifting in dissonant atmosphere. Heavy & melodic with rhythmic groove, the album had a rumbling impending sense of nearing inevitable confrontation culminating in doom-laden maelstrom. While not an easy sound to pin down, careful listenings find both post-industrial and even psychedelic ambiance -- a strange but brilliant (and most importantly) true architecture that ushered in the 90's first proliferation of mathcore, sludge and technical death outfits. At the time (and well ahead of its time), nothing else on the metal landscape sounded like this as it was hard to classify and almost beyond genre in so much that while outside the metal fringes, it was purely sincere without ever being pretentious. Even with drummer Away's ominous cover art, one look was enough to see & sense that this wasn't going to be any standard record that the average headbanger would expect to hear. It was just obvious that something about DH already set it way above n' well apart from the run-of-the-mill familiars. Forget labels, confines & barriers, this was more than bravely forging new ground and the sky was the limit for this kind of territory. Imaginative without ever feeling bloated (and that's not always a simple task to pull off), the DH story is about a machine's collision of atoms after a test that causes a fiery explosion that spills forth an alternate universe. Every phase of movement is a journey, with each song representing a stage; a chronology of both unpredictable trips & disorderly encounters. Leap after leap is an accumulation of wisdom and substance to maintain power as a lifesource from beginning to end. Leave it to these 4 Quebecers to take what is difficult and then turn what manages to come off as an effortless easy feat. The album is heady stuff indeed, albeit with everything happening through a more-menacing interstellar PINK FLOYDian/astral filter. And while many metalheads "didn't get it" or found the result was (what they whined) "too Twilight Zoney" and over their heads, the fact that VOIVOD had the balls to go in this creatively different & moody direction, and still release something so potent, hit me immediately and just blew me away. If some dismissed this outright as an unorthodox mindfuck, it was only the small-minded failure of those same people unable to open their mind to what indeed was expressive genius. It may have been an alien album (that alienated purists) but I remember the critical reviews were full of praise for its unusual yet intelligently daring composition. Perhaps equally amazing as the album's groundbreaking status is the correlation of the puzzling treatment the band have faced: they've been (and continue to be) criminally underrated & ignorantly underappreciated in Canadian hard music. If there's any legitimate blame for this, perhaps it's due to the band's unconventionalism which in turn has oddly enough been their long-respected strength amongst we devoted diehards who support them. They've always stuck to their guns even when accused of having compromised integrity or taken meandering missteps. For the longest time in the years after, I still couldn't find what others found so confusing about DH or what it was that made them come to the conclusion of not knowing what to make of it when listening. To me it was straight up obvious: a unique & fresh taste that kicked ass. The guitar work time signatures, percussion, singer Snake's accented vocals and the album's overall polished production are amazing. When I saw them live in Jan 1990 here in Toronto (with openers FAITH NO MORE and SOUNDGARDEN), everything about them having stemmed from DH by then (from their approach to delivery) had bore fruit. Genuine, honest & bullshit-free, they were absolutely incredible. To this day (while the album led directly to more transitional exploration with 'Nothingface' and the maligned 'Angel Rat' -- which in fairness has been rediscovered positively by initially dismissive fans), I consider DH without hesistation their crowning masterpiece. Irregular, out of bounds & clearly left-of-center, my love for it only grows. Happy 30th Anniversary.