20 Years of Killing Technology

The first guest post of the week is from the Mule .



When this album was released 20 years ago, there was no other band like Voivod. Twenty years later, there still isn’t. Seemingly beamed down from a post-nuclear future, the band offered the fearful and fearsome Killing Technology as their ultimate appraisal of their surroundings circa 1987. The album resounds with anxiety and forewarning set to Voivod’s newly perfected techno-thrash, and serves as the launching pad for their next few triumphs, including their career apex, Nothingface (1989).

Killing Technology followed Voivod’s first two releases, the raw, motorbreath-belching War and Pain, and RRRÖÖÖAAARRR, where they thrashed themselves into a stylistic corner and found themselves part of a scene they felt was artistically restrictive. Where War and Pain captured the excitement of a band hopped up on Venom, Motörhead, and Discharge, the second album was a messy, warp-speed enterprise, something the young band had to get out of their system, I suppose. I remember dismissing RRRÖÖÖAAARRR when it came out (I’ve warmed up to it now), but with Killing Technology, Voivod had clearly blasted off into new dimensions of progressive metal.

“We were really getting away from the thrash scene, being more influenced by gothic punk or industrial and things like that,” said drummer Michel “Away” Langevin on CBC’s Brave New Waves in 1989. “And also a lot of classical influence... We became more progressive, with more feelings, more different emotions.”

By 1987 the classic thrash canon was already in place, with Slayer, Metallica, Anthrax (and you might argue, Dark Angel and Kreator) having established the state of the art. Voivod found another direction, while expanding thrash’s sonic palette and subject matter. Recorded in Berlin with Harris Johns, it was their first album recorded away from home and with a “name” producer. Johns provided increased clarity and heaviness, but Voivod’s trademark assortment of wild frequencies—Blacky’s raunched-up bass tone, Away’s ringing high-hats and the Fripp-on-Benzedrine fretboard dynamics of guitarist Piggy (RIP)—remained in place. Despite Away’s claims about the band’s newfound influences around this time, their music remained as speedy and relentless as ever.

The topics the songs explored came out of the ominous events of the mid-’80s, as Away explained in 1989: “Killing Technology is part of the concept of the Voivod where we were talking about a society where technological improvement is going faster than social improvement. We felt that it could be dangerous in a few years. It’s related to everything that happened at that time, like the Chernobyl accident, the Star Wars project, and the Challenger explosion.” In tackling this subject matter, Killing Technology covers themes of manipulation and helplessness in the face of technology, politics and nature gone mad—all quite relevant to 1987, and even more relevant today.

Enough background—let’s drop the needle on side one, the “Killing” side. Brace yourselves, it’s a stone-cold classic side of metal.

The opening ambience of the title track brings to mind the spaceship cockpit depicted on the cover. Circuitry hums, a signal beeps, then a computer voice intones “We are connected.” The song roars to life, and the music’s focused mania makes it clear that Voivod’s songwriting and musicianship are on a much higher plane than before. “Killing Technology” is an epic that flows from killer part to killer part, using then abandoning verse/chorus structure as it goes. Snake’s singing has much more character than before—he’s given up trying to be Paul Dianno and is concentrating on being the best Snake he can be, delivering lines like “The fear will come from the sky, from behind!” with chilling drama.

The cool thing about Voivod’s sound is that it conjures such vivid pictures. As Chuck Eddy wrote in Stairway to Hell: The 500 Best Heavy Metal Albums in the Universe, “[Voivod] hails from a little Quebec town that houses North America’s biggest aluminum factory, and here, they sound like North America’s biggest aluminum factory.” The two songs that round out side one also share this characteristic. “Overreaction” is a breakneck thrash song about a nuclear disaster that actually sounds like a meltdown in progress, while listening to “Tornado” on headphones is like being sucked into a whirlwind. “Tornado” always seemed thematically out of place on Killing Technology, but if you expand the concept to include anything beyond mankind’s control (whether man-made or not), it’s not a bad fit.

Can you stand the pace? Time to flip it over to “Ravenous” side.

“Forgotten In Space,” is probably the most progressive, riff-packed song on the album, featuring two guitar solos from the prolific Piggy. The lyrics are a science fiction tale about a quest for liberty inside (and outside) a space ship full of prisoners (presumably on its way to Clutch’s “Prison Planet”). Our hapless protagonist ends up floating free with “not too much oxygen” on hand.

Still, he’s probably better off than the poor bastard who winds up on the examining table in “Ravenous Medicine.” After a few rounds of electro-shock therapy, radiation endurance tests, and drug trials at the science hospital, expiring in the vacuum of space seems like bliss. This grinding mid-paced number was the album’s “single,” with a video that garishly painted its tale of medical research gone amok, featuring Snake as a straitjacketed human guinea pig (check out their DVOD-1 for some behind-the-scenes footage of this video, as well as the full clip itself).

“Order of the Blackguards” ups the pace, ripping along effectively and containing one of the fastest passages on the album during Piggy’s solo. Its anti-authoritarian theme presents the blackguards as destroyers of knowledge, book-burners who enforce ignorance amongst the cowering, fragile-minded populace. It’s safe to say that “Order…” owes a debt to Ray Bradbury’s Farhenheit 451, thus joining heavy metal’s tradition of literature-inspired songs.

The album closes with “This Is Not an Exercise,” and the only logical scenario after the terrors depicted in the previous six songs: Doomsday. Naturally Voivod throw their own twist into the plot, in which the narrator has to break the news of the imminent catastrophe to a media-numbed citizenry: “And this is it, you better watch it live/I wake you up, this is not an exercise!” Musically, this song contains my favorite riff on the album, which erupts after the opening verse, and an abrupt yet powerful ending that sounds like the snuffing out of all life.

The final song also contains another line that resonates powerfully two decades later: “Don’t adjust your brain. It’s now, it’s real.” Today, when citizens and politicians can apparently adjust their brains to accept any pseudo-reality that promotes any agenda, it’s a message that needs to be heard again.