Voivod
Killing Technology

THE REVIEW

“Killing Technology” is the third phase of that process of deconstructing the thrash genre that will lead Voivod to the most beautiful pages of their career. It's the sterile horror of drugged silicon circuits, of artificial intelligence devoted to carnage. It's cyber thrash, a sick and distorted vision of an apocalyptic future of technological alienation, of a daily life turned nightmare for having become accustomed to the horrors of radiation, lasers slicing the sky, mutations disrupting bodies.

It's 1987. Voivod have just stopped spreading “war and pain” ('84) and roaring in the face of the world to “fuck off and die” ('86) and many expect (and perhaps still expect today..) yet another violent, uncompromising record. The international music scene (with thrash elevated to the role of the extreme reference genre), the attitude of the group demonstrated in previous releases, and even the artwork (yet another creation from the usual Away's artistic flair), seem to exclude any major upheavals in the band's production. The title track starts... and everything seems all too normal. '80s speed-thrash, direct and immediate, pure headbanging: verses and chorus alternate as prescribed in the Young Metalhead's manual. Even the vocal lines appear more orderly and ordinary: Snake seems almost to tame his howls, trying to reconcile the attempt at greater control over the vocals with the indispensable violence of his interpretation. Meanwhile, the band's progress is evident: the songwriting has become more mature, more cohesive. Piggy seems to have succeeded in his intent: to amalgamate and help the band grow technically, providing them the means to give voice to their musical visions.

But just when you are about to grab the labeller, just when you are ready to file everything away with a “nice, but already heard”, the rebellion begins. It's chaos taking over, the distortion of song structure, of the genre's norms. Sounds, tempos, and filtered voices mingle and contort: it's the Voivodian multiverse beginning to take shape, coiling upon itself in concentric circles and perpetual motions of accelerations and breaks. Every single track (with the sole exception of “Ravenous Medicine”: perhaps the most traditional episode of the pack) will follow this non-model: a first part facing the past and present, still tied to the conventions of the extreme metal prevailing in the years of the album's release, and a second, projected into the future of the band and metal music in general, fragmenting and faceting the thrash monolith. The result, in some ways, remains unchanged, but the means used to achieve it have changed (causing, from this album onwards, chronic nose-wrinkling from purists): a heaviness no longer attributable to the rigidity of the sound (“Maybe because we are heavier than all destructors,” sang Snake in the previous “RRROOOAAARRR”), but based on the length of the tracks and the complexity, unpredictability, and, in some cases, inaccessibility of the structures and compositional solutions.

Having set aside the barbaric deeds of “grand master of fast purification” Korgull, the stage where the apocalyptic nightmares of the four Canadians take life is no longer the post-atomic Middle Ages of the early albums, but a new and more evolved futuristic scenario, permeated by a horror even more disturbing because it is close to becoming tangible reality. It's the ghost of the nuclear spring of 1986 (year of the Chernobyl disaster) that inspires prophecies of technological alienations, of space life sentences (the excellent “Forgotten In Space”), of mutants and men reduced to lab experiments (“Ravenous Medicine”), of a destiny of destruction and progression enslavement that seems to be already written in the pages of human evolution (“the evolution can't run without damage”). That scientific and technological progress we can no longer do without and which will demand, sooner or later, its tribute of blood (“Don't be scared, the engines exploded, but it's just a technological risk”).

Heard in hindsight, “Killing Technology” inevitably suffers when compared to the band's immediately subsequent productions: “Dimension Hatross” ('88) and, most notably, “Nothingface” ('89). Yet it deserves credit for certain merits that, while not making it a masterpiece, increase its quality and importance. Perhaps it cannot be compared, in terms of genius, inventiveness, and experimentation, to the contemporary “Into The Pandemonium,” but it is with this album that D’Amour and company realize they can do it, that they have the numbers to achieve that musical shift that will lead them to skillfully blend metal, psychedelia, and progressive. It’s the courage to dare, the attempt, maybe still unripe, to give a new guise, that of unpredictability, to a genre that, in just a few years, would have said everything—or nearly everything—it had to say.

It is the seed of experimentation making its way through the distortions… timidly… before taking over.