INFINI

Infini is the second album Voivod recorded after guitar player Piggy's death. The band surpassed my expectations again. I would have imagined they had already used up the best available stuff on Katorz, but Piggy's bag of riffs must have been bottomless.

With God Phones we start with a true highlight, containing a slightly more progressive Voivod with more tempo changes and riff development then what we had gotten used to on the preceding albums. In the quicker parts they almost sound like Motorhead. It's Snake's merit really. He seems to have found his gruff Lemmy-bite back from Dimension Hatross and he really shines again. The Motorhead reference returns on the closing Volcano that has a very Ace of Spades type bass riff.

A string of short and snappy Voivod tracks follows. I can't grasp how they managed to craft such accomplished tracks from a couple of guitar riffs recorded on a PC, but somehow they did it. The songs are a lot more memorable and distinguishable from one another then on Katorz. The material is also more thrashy and dirty. A real improvement over the fairly tame rocking sound of the preceding albums.

This is a fairly long album for this kind of dense chromatic metal, so there are a couple of tracks I tend to skip in order to obtain a more manageable 45 minutes of Voivod. Treasure Chase, Krap, In Orbit and Deathproof tend to be sacrificed for that purpose. With Pyramidome they launch into an impressive final attack with Morpheus and Volcano as absolute album highlights.

A bit too long but a really good Voivod album that finds them in a tasty thrash metal mood. Some of the songs are downright excellent and the overall result averages out to a nice 3 stars.