Monday, 30 September 2013

Voivod - Nothingface (Fragments of Reactions)

I remember 'Nothingface', Voivod's fifth album.
I bought it on cassette tape from Our Price in Uxbridge, autumn fading into winter 1989.
Cold days.
Remember playing it for the first time, but can't remember what I felt, apart from being surprised that the Pink Floyd cover 'Astronomy Domine' sounded very Voivod-ish, and that the opening part of 'Missing Sequences' was very exciting.
The album got into my spine.
Something polar about it all, crisp and clean, like a shiny new hospital from another dimension. Emptied out of people, made pure by the snow. I had got it into my head that the album was a concept album, and portrayed the Voivod creature's journey into his own mind.
'Missing Sequences' made me think of people waltzing in the ruins of a factory or some kind of reactor. 'Pre-Ignition' rumbled along with a sense of growing disaster while 'Into my Hypercube' successfully managed to combine the sounds of a Morricone-esque spaghetti western soundtrack with a suburban haunted house.
An unnerving album. It sounds haunted, even now, 25 years after it was released.