Nothingface - Voivod (1989)

(The Nines - looking for some rhyme or reason for what to pick next, i started with a 2019 record and then went back ten years each time.)

I don’t want this review to be a biography, but it’s a question that I thought about as I was listening. It was hard to find new music in the midwest in the mid-80s, so even after I listened to a ton of metal I still didn’t know a lot of the bands that were out there. Soon after this i would get into hardcore punk, industrial, and prog rock. And I can’t help but wonder what would have happened if someone had just shown me Voivod.

This record mixes all of that in a way that would have hit me like a brick if i’d heard it then. Hearing it now, I still enjoy it. There’s a cover of Pink Floyd’s Astronomy Domine that I wouldn’t have recognized then, but I do now. It very well might have launched me in a bunch of new musical directions years earlier than I did otherwise.

The music is muscular and wiry, with none of the bloat that 80s metal could sometimes be a accused of. A fantastic record that I’m sad I didn’t hear when it came out.

Tracks I liked

Nothingface - great melody, great instrumentation

Astronomy Domine - better than Floyd’s recorded version. Fight me.

Missing Sequence - more punk / metal hybrid