Leaving Normal: Voivod’s Piggy

Ricecooker’s notes to to those who loved the best rotund thrash guitarist ever.:

Back in the mid to late 80s, when our underground scene was having its first musical adventures, most of the bands active were of the thrash and death metal persuasion and one of the foreign bands beloved by me and a few close friends was Canada’s Voivod. I was one of their biggest fans, complete with t-shirts and a very thick scrapbook on the band! When Punisher was writing their first few original songs, drummer Bullet came up with several tunes heavily influenced by Voivod, regretfully they were rejected by most others in the band as they were more into Metallica, Exodus and Forbidden (the Bay Area Thrash sound).

Voivod was unlike any other thrash metal bands of the day. Their musical influence was wide and unpredictable; spanning from the British New Wave of Heavy Metal to hardcore punk rock to post-punk to goth and progressive rock. This is why many in the local scene cannot understand them, let alone fall in love with their ingenuity. For me, Voivod was a post-hardcore punk band that loves to play metal!

The band never stayed at the same place musically. They were always moving, progressing into the unknown. The first album War & Pain is a total riot of corrossive death metal meets Die Kruezen and The Accused, the second album Roaaaaar is another gem, more polished but it was only when the 3rd album Killing Technology came out that the musical geniuses finally hit their best stride; mixing that Die Kruezen post-punk guitar sound and wailing with Public Image Limited’s percussive doom while the guitar sound shreds anything ever done by Slayer, amazing. The band put out another two super-important albums, going further into progressive post-metal areas and sci-fi concerns; Dimension Hatross and Nothingface (complete with a reworking of Pink Floyd’s Astronomy Domine). After that the band started to lose its touch, and even when I kept getting their subsequent albums, the new ones never came close to the classics.

Voivod recently reformed with vocalist Snake back in the fold and Metallica’s bassist Jason Newsted, another one of their biggest fans, manning the deep end and also producing duties. Together they put out one good album and was working on another one when Piggy died last Friday.

from: Roadrunner News

VOIVOD Guitarist DENIS ‘PIGGY’ D’AMOUR Dead Of Colon Cancer
Aug. 27, 2005

VOIVOD guitarist Denis “Piggy” D’Amour passed away Friday night (August 26) at approximately 11:45 p.m. due to complications from advanced colon cancer ‚Äî so advanced that the disease had spread to his liver. D’Amour slipped into a coma Thursday night and died less than 24 hours later in the palliative care unit of a Montreal hospital, surrounded by family and friends. He was 45 years old.

Quebec City newspaper Le Soleil reported yesterday that D’Amour ‚Äî who was diagnosed with colon cancer earlier in the summer ‚Äî first entered the hospital for a routine operation, but several complications led his doctors to suspect more problems. Then the grim verdict was revealed: the cancer, already too advanced, was inoperable.

Only two months ago, D’Amour was in the studio working on the 14th album from the Canadian thrash-metal pioneers VOIVOD. More than two dozen tracks are believed to have been demoed for the CD, for which the group recently inked a deal with The End Records. However, the band were forced to put studio work on hold while bassist Jason Newsted (ex-METALLICA) was treated for tendonitis.

In a recent interview with Billboard.com, Newsted spoke about the material slated to appear on the group’s next CD. “It’s the most complete demos I’ve ever been involved in,” he said. “[VOIVOD singer] Snake has already chosen his effects ‚Äî exact timing of milliseconds for delay. We’ve had a long time to develop the demos, so there’s about 23 or 25 songs that are absolutely listenable right now.”

Newsted was a huge fan of VOIVOD before he was invited to join and he remains a great admirer to this day. “They created something a long, long time ago that may have been emulated many, many times since ‚Äî but nobody can do it like the original,” he offered.

Prior to his hospitalization, D’Amour laid down guitar tracks for a reunion CD from the legendary AUT’CHOSE, a ’70s band from Montreal. That album is expected to surface next summer.

for more on the great VOIVOD!

voivod.com
voivod.net
voivodfan.com