When Target Earth was released, a lot of Voivod fans heralded the release as a return to form for the three-decades-old band.
Gaining such critical acclaim so late in the game is rare under the best of circumstances, but this was coupled with the sad fact that it was the first album from the band without Denis “Piggy” D’Amour, who had died from colon cancer complications in 2005. Two Voivod releases since then–Katorz and Infini–included his final recordings, but the thirteenth studio album in their illustrious career was the first time new guitarist Daniel “Chewy” Mongrain had to take the reins.
After a few releases featuring former Metallica bassist Jason Newsted and more traditional song structures, it’s refreshing to hear the band rekindle the most fertile period for the band. After helping invent death metal in the early ‘80s, the Canadian crew put out a string of albums that merged heavy psych and prog elements into their sound, reinventing themselves and also stretching the limits of what underground metal bands could do.
The follow-up album The Wake (Century Media) goes even further into the stratosphere, rendering the preceding album a release that bridges Voivod from the relatively poppy songcraft of the Newstead years to something far more wooly and unique.
This is obvious during “The End of Dormancy,” which sounds like what maybe the band would have liked to have done on 1988’s Dimension Hatröss–the original transitional album for the band–had they been as musically adept as they are today. Over the course of seven-plus minutes, the band goes on a noirish journey into space, with a psychedelic mosh part and twisted anarchic riffs that do honor to the legacy of their innovative fallen guitarist. It’s one of the band’s most dynamic songs ever, accomplishing what the band’s magnum opus, “Jack Luminous” off The Outer Limits, did in half the time.
It doesn’t end there, either. “Orb Confusion” actually swings thanks to new bassist Dominique “Rocky” Laroche’s shifty bass lines. The first single, “Obsolete Beings,” thrashes righteously, “Spherical Perpective” has more time changes than the a clock store at Daylight Savings, and album closer, “Sonic Myceium,” is what progressive jazz sounds like in the hands of progressive heshers.
You can’t blame Voivod for being stuck for a while; they were using guitar parts that were written at one point in time, recording with a mercenary rock star bassist. The band that notoriously never stood still was forced to do just that by circumstance. With The Wake, Voivod moves on from punctuated equilibrium to the Quantum evolution the band was known for, and in doing so created one of the best albums of a long career.
