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Voivod - Infini

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 July 17 2009 at 03:49:59 AM



Girl, you know it’s true: The quality of Away’s cover-art parallels the music quality therein. War and Pain depicts one of those zombpires donning a Prussian helmet, hissing sci-fi obscenities through his melting face while preparing to fire off some cuke-sized rounds from his Gamma World gun. Plant a ribbon on it and watch it grow. Best art, best record. Rrroooaaarrr’s mechanized apoklips machine replete with scrap-steel faced agro-naut comes in a distant second. Killing Tech’s art is far too early George Lucas for me (I like the record quite a bit though). Dimension Hatross’ cover is a subtle improvement, but the music is the result of sending Denis “Piggy” D’Amour to a local comics convention and asking him to compose a tone poem from his experience. [In Rick Moranis’ whino voice] “Hey, Hoser: If you never fucked a Klingon you don’t know what yr missin.”

The fall from there was Big G Great. Now we’re – appropriately – given Infini, the bona fides swansong (merci fuckin’ beaucoup), some even with bolted nuts of the Monsieur Cochon’s six-string work stapled into place. Never mind the black steel porcine gasmask cover-art I know I’ve seen in a Michael Ninn flick, this is some ankle-deep eel shit passed off for – I hope – psychotically bathetic fans only. I would love to blame this stinker on that skidmark Jason Newsted, but, sadly, its failure rests firmly on all shoulders. Sure, Snake always sounded like he was trying to pass a walrus through his colon, but now it sounds like he’s deriving pleasure from it, all while imagining himself with a Bowie haircut and Iggy’s abs. It’s eerie. Ah, really eerie.

And then the other night after a few thousand Old Fashioneds it came not so suddenly to me why I hate this record so much: These songs are actually Green Day’s. Jason Newsted, enterprising hair farmer he is, sold some of Hetfield’s old hair plugs to GD vocalist, B.J. Armstrong, the ever-eclectic collector, for a few moist-palm ditties. So ‘Strong took to the pie-anner with pen ‘n’ paper. Three days, a package of tofu-pups, 32 wheatgrass juices, four negress hookers, and a soap-on-ah-rope type serenade to a drunken Kid “I don’t do dudes” Rock (purely for inspiration purposes only) later, Newsted gets Infini. “Bite my lip and close my eyes / Take me away to paradise / I’m so damn bored I’m going blind! / And I smell like shit… Ain’t there uh reason they titled the rec Dookie, folks?

[Stewart Voegtlin]

Voivod
Infini
2009
Relapse Records
type: reviews    keywords: away, lhp028, dookie, another bad idea, ninn,   

Comments (13)

  • 17 comments
    James
    9:57 AM on Jul 17, 2009 // reply »
    This CD is really good if you use it around the house to squash roaches.
  • 108 comments
    jniff
    2:06 PM on Jul 17, 2009 // reply »
    I was hoping it might be good, but what I've heard was quite boring.
  • 11 comments
    Dustin
    3:43 PM on Jul 17, 2009 // reply »
    Voivod was the sole point of light through my middle and high school years. I would still place Nothingface as a pre-collapse album, but you're right in that their fall from grace was catastrophic. The Newsted albums are laughable, disturbingly bad laziness.
  • 15 comments
    Anthony
    12:45 AM on Jul 18, 2009 // reply »
    The only Newstead-era Voivod I've listened to was the first, self-titled one. I tried to love it, didn't hate it exactly, but was baffled by why Voivod had mutated into 90s era radio rock, especially given that it was no longer the 90s. Ah well. I just can't slam Voivod, you know? Even at their lousiest, their hearts seemed more good than evil. I'm just going to not buy this thing and call it good.
  • 371 comments
    VOEGTLIN
    6:33 AM on Jul 24, 2009 // reply »
    They don't sound/look like "Voivod" any more, though. I didn't even think/feel like I was listening to one of my favorite fuckin' bands. It's depressing.
  • 5 comments
    PETE
    6:06 AM on Dec 31, 2011 // reply »
    Even a shit VoiVod album is worth more than a lot of bands entire careers. Like it or not how many people could record an album like this from beyond the grave? There is no good or bad with VoiVod, you're either down or you're not.
  • 1 comment
    Chuck Berry's Dancing Corpse
    2:06 AM on Aug 04, 2009 // reply »
    I don't get how people keep defending crap when they know it's crap. Nostalgia is getting in the way of your healthier opinions, you really should know better. Buying Voivod just 'cuz it's Voivod is as stupid as eating at McDonalds everytime you don't have energy to cook, or as stupid as buying Death Magnetic becasue you liked Ride the lightning. Just because a crap Voivod record is better than some other shit record, why is that a reason to endorse shit?
  • 5 comments
    PETE
    6:06 AM on Dec 31, 2011 // reply »
    It's not nostalgia, it is my opinion that this is by no means a great VoiVod album but it is not a terrible album. Many good bands release crappier records but they only suck judged against that bands standards. 'Infini' is not a masterstroke like 'Nothingface' but neither does it sound like Green Day. The above is not a review but a non sequitur.
  • 371 comments
    VOEGTLIN
    6:36 AM on Aug 05, 2009 // reply »
    Psychotically bathetic fan ALERT.

    Hey, Pete -

    Q: How many nihilists does it take to screw in a light bulb?

    A: Vans.

  • 1 comment
    Piggy's Ghost
    9:55 AM on Aug 05, 2009 // reply »
    The thing is that even a D+ Voivod album still beats out the relative B- efforts of most bands.
  • 371 comments
    VOEGTLIN
    10:00 AM on Aug 05, 2009 // reply »
    Black Flag's My War is a "B-" effort. There is no "D+" Voivod album even in its fuckin zipcode, Scrapple.
  • 11 comments
    Dustin
    12:06 PM on Aug 05, 2009 // reply »
    I don't want to be too cynical about these guys, because they were my heroes as a young'un, but i think all this post-mortem voivod shit is whack. i'd heard them say before that it took them YEARS to write Nothingface, so they must have been in serious denial about the quality of their later material, which i'm sure only took them WEEKS to write, sitting in the studio and editing brain-fart riffs into songs using pro-tools. there are folks who use guitars and computers and come up with some insane shit. not this. people get old and stop trying, that's what i see.
  • 40 comments
    The Right Hand Path
    2:17 AM on Dec 31, 2011 // reply »
    Cool.
 

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