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Click on the song links to see the lyrics
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METAL
HAMMER magazine review,
November 1995, pp. 70.
© 1995 by Dennis Publishing, Ltd.
NEGATRON - Voivod (Play it Again Sam)
RATING: 4 out of 5
Thirteen years and seven albums later, Voivod are still looking
for the sales figures to match their critical acclaim. Cited as
the influence by bands as polarly opposed as Pantera and Sonic Youth,
they have constantly been at the forefront of the cerebrally stimulating.
Though it's debatable whether 'Negatron' will have them appearing
on TOTP, it is as extreme and challenging an album as any of its
predecessors. With the usual splattering of conspiracy theories
and even the odd alien abduction, 'Negatron' has enough mileage
in it to run and run. All in all, 'Negatron' is a lot heavier than
a very heavy thing.
-- Denise Stillie
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Negatron
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New
Musical Express review
(10/28/95, p.56) - 7 (out of 10) -
"...NEGATRON is a move towards an almost approachable sound, like
the point where Corrosion Of Conformity meet Ministry, a step
on from their real hardcore industrial acid outpourings of a few
years back..."
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| Rocknet
review |
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Phil Kime's
Negatron Review
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J. Eric C Smith
Negatron Review
Guitarist Denis D'Amour and drummer/conceptualist Michel Langevin
have invested 13 years in getting Voivod to the point where it
is generally regarded as Quebec's premier metallic export, if
you exclude copper and iron ore. At the hump of the '90s, however,
Langevin and D'Amour must have done a little corporate self-assessment
in keeping with the spirit of the age; for Negatron they optimally
re-engineered the band by outsourcing singer Denis Belanger and
bassist Jean-Yves Theriault in favor of the more economical Eric
Forrest, a singing bassist. It was a bold shift in product paradigm
that should open untapped temperate zone markets, mainly by inspiring
scads of metal heads to injure each other in fits of high-energy
anomic joy.
Forrest provides a step-function improvement over
the vaguely fey Belanger, roaring out Langevin's atrocity fables
in a voice that rates somewhere between 7.0 Hetfields and 8.0
Rollinses on the Pitch-Neutralized Glenn Danzig Bellowing Scale.
Tempos are way up on Negatron as well, making it an album that
warrants proper head-banging instead of the loose distracted hair
tossing induced by Voivod's last disk, Outer Limits. The CD pressing
of Negatron contains the vile video for the single "Insect"
buried inside Langevin's nightmarish CD-ROM interactive lyric
sheet. If that's not enough to really pique your interest, then
hang on 'til Jim Thirlwell shows up for the album's hilariously
titled closing track, "DNA (Don't No Anything)". Ignorance
like this really is blissful.
Copyright 1995-1999: J. Eric Smith.
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Released
in 1995 by Hypnotic
Records
Produced, recorded and mixed by Mark S. Berry
Denis D'Amour: Guitars & Effects
Eric Forrest: Bass & Vocals
Michel Langevin: Drums & Percussion
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All-Music
Guide review
4 pts.
AMG REVIEW: It's hard to believe that the same band capable of composing
such superb (and criminally overlooked) progressive-metal masterpieces
as Nothingface and Angel
Rat would resort to the more conventional heavy metal sounds
of their inconsistent earlier albums. With the addition of new bassist/lead
singer Eric Forrest, Voivod promptly rejected the unconventionality
that set them apart from the rest of the metal pack, since Forrest's
vocal style is more similar to the growls heard so commonly in death
metal. Maybe being dropped by the major label Mechanic/MCA after
record sales began to sag brought on the change in direction. The
obvious difference between Negatron and past triumphs is that the
majority of the album blends together, with very little variation.
Which is very surprising, since variation and texture were major
ingredients in Voivod's original sound. After hearing such cuts
as the title track, "Insect," and "Nanoman" (the later contains
a guitar riff popularized in the Metallica song "One," then copied
by a million other metal bands), the decline is obvious. Too bad
Voivod decided to reinvent themselves as a straight-ahead metal
band and shun their progressive side
-- Greg Prato, All-Music Guide
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| The
war against silence" web fanzine review |
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