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Voivod - Nothingface CD (album) cover

NOTHINGFACE

Voivod

 

Tech/Extreme Prog Metal

4.24 | 362 ratings

From Progarchives.com, the ultimate progressive rock music website

zravkapt
Special Collaborator
Honorary Collaborator
4 stars OK, gather around kids, I'm going to tell you what prog-metal *should* sound like. Shredding, blastbeats and New Age keyboards is NOT how prog-metal should sound. This album came out in 1989 and is even 'proggier' than their last album. However, I'm not too much into what they did after this, mainly because later albums seemed either more streamlined or wanted to sound more like 'normal' metal. Actually, I'm not much into their early hardcore punk/thrash stuff either. But here they reached their artistic peak. Nothingface has great production for it's genre and era, mainly because you can actually hear the bass! Of course these guys had a Floyd influence(more on that later), but I read an interview with them from the early '90s where they say they used to listen to Magma(!) A metal band from Quebec influenced by Magma...Awesome!!!

I still have my original cassette of this somewhere(I think), but I recently heard a remastered CD of this album and I didn't like it so much. It's too compressed and the drums are too loud and irritating to the ears. Also, they have the "Intro" to "Unknown Knows" as a seperate track. Why? What was the point of that? I guess in case some kid with ADHDDVDVD got bored with the 30 seconds of spacy noises and just wanted to get to the rockin' part of "Unknown Knows". Well, before somebody sucked the life out of this album by remastering it, it *was* a great sounding album. Lots of dynamics: the quiet parts were quiet and the loud parts were loud. Y'know, the way music is *supposed* to sound!

One of the band members was named 'Piggy', I think it was the bass player, not sure. Anyway, the three musicians just gel here. Lots of start/stop stuff going on where the three seem connected telepathically. Changes in tempo and time, tritones and dissonance pretty much separated Voivod from other metal bands in the late '80s. The most well-known song here is of course their cover of Floyd's "Astronomy Domine" which is well done(they later did a version of another Floyd track "The Nile Song" which is...uh...not so well done). Clearly they based their version on the one found on Ummagumma. Oh yeah, they have a singer too. Great album. 4 stars(try and track down an older copy if you can).

zravkapt | 4/5 |

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