location: Zagreb / Vintage Industrial Bar / Croatia
date: 03.10.2017
Less than a year has passed since the cult Canadian veterans of experimental metal Voivod, famed for their artistically visionary, full-blooded wrestling with the spheres of undiscovered musical dimensions, last visited, and the rock-solid quartet is already back on the stages of the old continent, led by the brilliant musical visionary, artist and drummer of the band Michel Langevin (Away). Last year Voivod played Ljubljana’s Orto bar, and this year they stopped by Croatia. First in Pula, then a day later in the Croatian capital, Zagreb. In Zagreb, RockLine has covered this band once before, at the legendary club KSET, back in early May 2011. Ahhh, those beautiful memories.
Despite career upheavals, ups and downs and lineup changes among key members, Voivod remain a firmly saddled crew with a musical dossier all their own, still scooping up creative inspiration by the ladleful, which Voivod have kept taking into the fields of experimental adventurism over the last decade too. In that, few are equal to Voivod. Actually, nobody. The excellent current album “Target Earth” and the new EP “Post Society” released after it last year uphold the artistic pedigree earned through the eighties and nineties, while guitarist Daniel “Chewy” Mongrain has been proving with his exceptional quality for almost a full decade that filling the giant shoes of the late and anything but easily replaceable Piggy is no light load to carry.
Before Voivod even took the stage, the Berlin doom/sludge metallers Earth Ship served up the opening for this new concert feast. Last year they released their fourth studio album “Hollowed”, and they now operate as a trio: Jan Oberg (guitar, vocals), Sabine Oberg (bass) and Florian Hauser (drums). It’s on that latest record, “Hollowed”, that you can catch the band’s artistic expansion, as they packed it with a heap of varied and dynamic songs. Earth Ship built their set mostly around the current album. That let them rage uncompromisingly and fire from every position, and more than once they brought Kylesa and Crowbar to mind. Morbid melodies reigned, and a faint whiff of idols Alice In Chains could be picked up too. Monolithic doom volleys, then, and a deeply committed, confident performance over a solid 45 minutes.
Voivod hit the stage at eleven in the evening. They didn’t really “update” the set list all that much compared to the one they played a year ago in Ljubljana, though the EP “Post Society” got a fuller showcase, with Voivod playing four of the five songs on it this time.
Voivod remain an absolute one-of-a-kind, and their infectious stage charisma and likability remain the unspoiled companions of their shows. The Zagreb gig confirmed it. We had hoped the club would be packed to the rafters, but around 200 people showed up, and in the front row two seriously fired-up fans from Slovenia were going wild, having come straight from Babno Polje, which is a two-and-a-half-hour drive one way to Zagreb. Denis Belanger is an incredible frontman. A charismatic, jokey, rough-edged teddy bear who deliberately uses his stage presence to give off that feeling of a lovably huge lump of a guy, and who keeps the crowd right by his side with his hilariously contorted grimaces. Guitarist Chewy kept developing even more facial elasticity, and it’s immediately clear where he got that nickname. The band is incredibly agile and dynamic on stage. New bassist Dominique Laroche (Rocky), who joined the band in 2014, and Chewy communicate constantly with each other, and more than once during the show they completely swapped the right and left sides of the stage. Away raged across his (admittedly modest) drum kit, working miracles on it yet again and reminding everyone once more of just how exceptional he is. The band seemed practically infallible and brilliantly tight. With all the kinetics and adrenaline they unleashed, they didn’t show a hint of stage imprecision or sloppiness for even a moment. The set included quite a few musical delights from the cult eighties era. They leaned especially on the material from the notorious album “Killing Technology” (1987), and played one song from each of the albums released between 1984 and 1991. The end of the show definitely came when the band launched into the expected Voivod, far too soon. In the obligatory encore it wasn’t hard to guess what Voivod were about to play. Especially when Belanger revealed it was a cover of another band and that the song was dedicated to Lemmy. Voivod recently released a seven-inch vinyl single, “Space Machine”. It’s a cover of the original by cult space rockers Hawkwind, which Voivod dressed up in their own musical dossier. Their version is so ravenous that even in the encore Voivod managed to get the front rows moshing wildly.
Atonal chords, a series of “sci-fi broken” rhythms that provide the framework for the unpredictable development of the compositions, slamming transitional sections played in the least expected way, drums that seem to be playing the rhythms “in reverse” and make you feel like it’s actually the guitar holding the main rhythm, and more. Voivod, in other words, bring it all. They’re an experience that, with its energy and layered genre fusion, where you hear everything from thrash metal to punk, raw rock’n’roll devastation, even classical touches, delivers a whole sack of big-gig fun and spectacle. That’s the main thing. For all those more demanding listeners who swear by musical weirdness in experimentation, and for all those who simply came for a dose of solid, direct racket and roar! A cannonball and a projectile, straight on, that once again hit the bullseye!
The birth of a post-apocalyptic society of robot zombies on the wings of musical devices, the creation of a unique world of musical culture by the Canadian experimental greats Voivod. Unforgettable!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
setlist:
1. Intro
2. Killing Technology
3. Post Society
4. Chaosmöngers
5. The Unknown Knows
6. Overreaction
7. The Prow
8. Ravenous Medicine
9. Fall
10. Korgüll the Exterminator
11. The Lost Machine
12. We Are Connected
13. Voivod
—encore—
14. Silver Machine
