Voivod - The Wake

Thrash metal’s insistently weird philosophical contemplators, Voivod, come off their 2016 EP of technology-focused musings about the disintegration of human society with an hour-long offering of more of their reliable brand of quirky progressive thrash metal. The Wake is the Canadian band’s fourteenth studio album, and at this stage in their career, it’s almost easy to take Voivod for granted given their consistent dedication to their singular sound and their continuous ambition throughout their various ventures into other styles throughout their career and their vision as of late of making some of the most head-turning thrash metal out there. But (relatively) recent albums like Infini and Target Earth that have found the band returning to their thrash roots with a renewed progressive inspiration have highlighted at the very least how unique Voivod’s voice within metal is (quite literally, given Denis Bélanger’s ever-odd presence behind the microphone). And The Wake certainly serves as another testimony to the band’s continued determination and inspiration.

Voivod do not moderate their eccentricity on The Wake, not that there was really any expectation that they would, but it’s still good to hear their steadfastness to what really sets them apart from other bands in nearby lanes. As looming and dissonant as ever, Voivod continue their tech-fueled apocalyptic prophecies through malfunctioning-machine-like riffs and solos that set the twilight-zone-esque tone of the material.

Where the album is at its least armored is rather foreseeable at this point for fans as well, and that is in the lyrical department. The band certainly have their sights set on a specific vision of a technology-driven catastrophe in humanity’s near future, which, to their credit, they have been on about since roughly the beginning of their career. But they can’t seem to relay these ideas in a manner as unique as their music or as compelling to justify the band’s covering such widely-addressed topics. The introductory track, “Obsolete Beings” relates the planned obsolescence of smartphones to the eventual phasing out of human beings by a thematically disconnected berating of the obsession with such phones.

The introductory track, however, seems to serve as simply an opening credits sequence for a confusing narrative the album seems to follow through the eyes of a disoriented governmental agent who took part in a failed oceanic mission investigating the awakening of a fearsome alien weapon of apocalyptic magnitude (not really alien though), while the narrator frantically tries to recollect their memories relating to an inter-governmental conspiracy involving the numbing of the masses through satellite control. The song “Event Horizon” eventually reveals this ancient weapon to be of biological nature: a reawakened bacteria, and the song’s lyrics are some of the album’s better displays of lyricism, speaking of humanity’s succumbing to its surrender of free will to an all knowing big brother government amidst a global flood, the last line highlighting the futility and grand meaninglessness of the struggle” “in space we burst without a trace”. The last two songs on the album serve as a strange lament and an amalgamation of the lyrics of previous songs that conclude that “the time is still ruled / by the sky”.

As for the instrumental component of the album, it’s some of Voivod’s best-produced material, each piece clear and discernible from the others. Compositionally, it’s even a step up from Target Earth, taking the experimentally proggy elements from Post Society and mixing them with the thrash the band has adhered to. The songs twist and wind through intriguing and dynamic structures involving eerie hums and clean guitar parts among traditional thrash riffs like the many that link “The End of Dormancy” together to supplement their sci-fi narrative. The band bring their subtly jazz-inspired dissonance to a variety of guitar backing parts, but perhaps most unusually to the chromatic vocal melody on the song “Orb Confusion”. The band even incorporate strings among the haunting clean vocal lines into the thunderous climax of the song “Iconspiracy”. The album isn’t all peaches and cream in the instrumental department either though; the album does have its instrumental weak links, like the half-baked speedy thrash of “Always Moving” and the less dynamic writing on “Spherical Perspective”.

This album definitely has its noticeable weaknesses. The semi-narrative concept the album is built around isn’t as fully fleshed out as something of its magnitude should be. However, despite the album’s disjointed narrative, it does manage to cultivate the general sense of paranoia it speaks of and it does still accomplish its primary goal of further establishing Voivod’s footing in their own solitary niche in the proggier zone of thrash metal. The album’s strength is definitely found within its instrumentals and creative song-writing, which is damn impressive at this stage of Voivod’s career. The only general weakness among the album’s instrumentals is the homogeneous tone it builds up as the band’s twists and turns become less unpredictable over time. Voivod have gone so many places musically throughout their artistic journey, I just wish at this point, now that they have solidified their confidence with this sci-fi thrash they’ve branded, that they would perhaps reintroduce the ideas from old oddball albums like Negatron to make their sound more well-rounded and consistently captivating from beginning to end on an album like this.