Dimension Hatross, man. This and Nothingface are the ones that started it all for me. I think I'd been reading about Voivod for awhile in the pages of Metal Maniacs, which was my bible in the late 80s. One way or another, I'd been hearing about this idiosyncratic thrash band that had science-fiction themed concept records, and just the idea of that sent me scurrying to my local Camelot music to check them out. I picked up those two albums together on the same day, the artwork on the covers sending my imagination and curiosity into overdrive. Looking at the cassette art for Hatross, I had absolutely no idea what I was in for. But when I popped that tape into my deck back at home, and the "Prologue" kicks in and gives over to "Experiment" and "Tribal Convictions", I was absolutely hooked. The music sounded exactly like the cover art: cold, bizarre, otherworldly. Dangerous, but intelligent. A portal into a weird post-apocalyptic nightmare that hit the same exposed nerves in my system as the weird science fiction paperbacks I was reading at the time, and the René Laloux films Fantastic Planet and Gandahar that I was completely obsessed with. This vortex of offbeat fantastical imagery and sound penetrated my bedroom; I think I listened to both Voivod albums together on repeat for hours. The impact on me was huge. For years, though, Voivod's stuff flitted in and out of print. In the past few years, the resuscitated German label Noise Records has stepped up and released a series of high-quality reissues of the label's Voivod material, ranging from deluxe multi-disc CD/DVD sets to gorgeous vinyl to massive box sets heavy enough to crack someone in the head with.

Like the other single-album reissues, this Noise Records reissue of 1988's Dimension Hatross is just amazing, especially the CD/DVD edition. The LP is quite nice, is a near-perfect replica of the original eight-song album release , while the CD (a triple-disc set) features the album with the notorious "Batman" bonus track, along with cramming together so much Hatross-era material that it takes aeons to digest it all. Which I've done multiple times, with all of these reissues. I can't think of a better way to spend an afternoon (or seven). For the CD edition of Dimension Hatross, the main disc presents the nine-song album version, remastered. It sounds magnificent. A tight forty-one minute run-time. More than any previous Voivod album, this feels like a concept album from the start, the way the songs are structured, the narrative ideas that reveal themselves as you read through the track list. I personally wouldn't realize it until years later, but at this point Voivod's lexicon had exploded by the culmination of the band's obsessions: the modern classical music of Béla Bartók, Arnold Schoenberg, and Igor Stravinsky; industrial music; the stranger fringes of hardcore punk a la Die Kreuzen; Larks' Tongues in Aspic / Red-era King Crimson; the apocalyptic post-punk of Killing Joke (whose influence on Voivod has long been underestimated / under realized). And through all of this, these guys were still worshipping at the whiskey-stained altars of Motorhead and Discharge. The previous Voivod albums were wild, for sure, from Rrröööaaarrr's mutant hardcore punk to Killing Technology 's prog-rock damaged thrash metal. But nothing that came before this sounded like what happened on Hatross.

Dimension Hatross is a journey. From the effects-laden loops of noise that wash over the beginning of "Experiment", creating an undulating mass of mechanical whirr before the rhythm section kicks in with the band's stilted, off-kilter time signatures and Piggy's harsh, unconventional chord phrasings. Even when the opener fully blows open into the thrash, it sounds alien, Snake portentously howling and sneering over the strange speed metal attack. The progginess is there from the word go. As a young thrash metal fanatic, the album's opening blew my doors down when I first picked this up. Texturally experimental and oddly structured, but absolutely aggressive in delivery, with that King Crimson-esque freakout in the latter half interlaced with more accessible blues-scale shredding, man, I was entranced. And then "Tribal Convictions" gradually fades in, the long build up with rolling toms and invocations from a different light spectrum, flattening you as the song unfolds into this bizarre but totally catchy mid-paced cyborg anthem. Instant earworm, in spite of its otherworldly ambience. I wouldn't see the music video for "Tribal" until much later, so my imagination conjured all kinds of strange visions in my head as it played out; that latter half where the Killing Joke influence really bleeds through as the song transforms into a mutant thrash attack still remains one of the highlights of the Voivod catalog for me.

Then the skewed driving force of "Chaosmongers" delivers more of that complex, splintering speed-attack; part of the magick of this album is how the band wove these irresistible anthemic chorus hooks among all of the otherwise experimental metal. Lightning in a bottle. I could easily rant and rave about Hatross track-by-track. But it's the whole experience, jumping into it from start to finish, that makes this so crucial. The specter-like wisps of Piggy's guitar that drift over the charging speed metal of "Technocratic Manipulators" slides seamlessly and slowly into the quirked-out alien code of "Macrosolutions To Megaproblems". That ending rumblescape leading into "Brain Scan"'s narcotized see-sawing skronk. Each song book ended by ambient discordance. "Psychic Vacuum"'s soaring speed-prog. Climaxing with the epic convulsions of "Cosmic Drama". A perfect closer to the LP proper. The album flows perfectly as this panoramic, dystopian saga. Reading the lyrics as you listen to Hatross is essential. Necessary and unmissable narrative context for the musical strangeness. It would be a few years later that I would listen to the CD version and hear that bonkers cover of the "Batman" theme tacked onto the very end. It was so jarring, creating this destabilizing outro to the Hatross experience. A real what in the fuck moment when i first heard it. Now? I can't imagine not hearing it close the album. Concretizing the madness of it all. It's a sonic warpdrive. Dimension Hatross is some kind of dark sorcery. A top-ten, desert-island-disc album for me.

As with the other CD/DVD sets in the Voivod reissue campaign, the second disc is a live album, and it's a fucking ripper. Sixty-nine minutes of psychedelic thrash overload. Titled Spectrum '88 - A Flawless Structure , it's a masterfully mixed and mastered live set of the band performing a devastating fourteen-song set at the now-gone Montreal cabaret club The Spectrum on December 21st, 1988. Holy shit, does this set wreck. The energy-level is radioactive, the performances virtually perfect, the weirdness absolute. After dousing the audience in a sprawl of lysergic drone and sinister guitar noise, Voivod proceeds to decimate with an un-fuck-withable set-list: they play almost every sibng song off of the then-recent Dimension Hatross album ("Overreaction", "Experiment", "Tribal Convictions", "Chaosmöngers", "Technocratic Manipulators", "Macrosolutions To Megaproblems", "Brain Scan", "Psychic Vacuum"), a chunk of Killing Technology ("Ravenous Medicine", "Korgüll The Exterminator", "Order Of The Blackguards"), and a righteous War And Pain "medley". Snake throws in some interesting vocal phrasing that gives some of the older songs an interesting, quirky flare, and there are a bunch of cool variations on some of these same song structures that keep things unpredictable. This whole thing sounds punk as fuck. Part of that is because of the encore, where Voivod proceed to blast the audience with not only their unique cover of the Batman theme song, but a snarling cover of Dead Kennedys' "Holiday In Cambodia". Oh man.

The DVD again offers a rich combination of audio material, incredible live performance video, artwork galleries, and contemporaneous live/studio band photos. The Hatross DVD only features one audio set, Dimension Hatröss Demo 1987, and it is an ass-whipper, pal. The track list is most of what would later be re-recorded for the album: "Experiment", "Tribal Convictions", "Chaosmöngers", "Technocratic Manipulators", "Macrosolutions To Megaproblems", "Brain Scan", "Psychic Vacuum", and "Cosmic Drama". Thirty-nine minutes of embryonic conceptual prog-thrash delivered at head-spinning intensity and velocity. I'm not sure of the studio specs, but it sounds like the demo set was recorded live, and it has all of the chaotic energy of a concert performance, while boasting a warts-n'-all, slightly cavernous production that works with the band's otherworldly vibe. As usual, you get some different vocal phrasings from Snake and while the songs are essentially in the same form as what would comprise the album, there are those bits here and there that do make this a different listening experience from the album proper, especially with Piggy's riffing and soloing. It's superbly raw, like listening to Voivod run through the album in a practice space, all necro-systems go.

And as usual, the concert video collection is mind-blowing. About four hours of never-before-seen live Voivod footage. Good Christ. It's amazing to watch people circle-pit to quasi-prog riffs. The first is a rough n' tumble camcorder film of Voivod performing at Blondies in Detroit, Michigan in November 1988; the set list remains more or less the same through all of these videos ("Overreaction", "Experiment", "Tribal Convictions", "Chaosmöngers", "Ravenous Medicine", "Korgüll The Exterminator", "Technocratic Manipulators", "Macrosolutions To Megaproblems", "War And Pain Medley", "Brain Scan", "Psychic Vacuum", and the totally spaced-out covers of Dead Kennedys' "Holiday In Cambodia" and Neal Hefti's "Batman" that close the show), but each concert has its own specific psychotic frequency. This Detroit set has great sound and video, minimal audio hiss, nicely mastered, and is shot right off to the left of the stage, so you get the band delivering their Morgoth dreams and post-nuke vampire hallucinations right in your goddamned face (albeit with one stocky stage hand sometimes getting in the way). The audience is berserk, with near ceaseless stage diving and a beautifully turbulent pit caught in the throes of the Hatross transmissions. It is beautiful. The Axiom show in Houston, Texas on December 10th, 1988 is filmed from the back of the room so the band angle is a little iffy, the cameraperson is being jostled all over, video is a little blurry and it almost feels like the show is in a small basement, the crowd is wild (natch, it's Texas fer chrissakes), but there are plenty of close-ups and the sound is solid. It's a blast, total chaos. Then we're off to a November '88 show at the legendary Anthrax venue in Norwalk, CT: another killer vid shot from the back of the club but zoomed in on the stage, crowd is losing their minds (it's fantastic documentation of what a thrash metal pit looked like in the late 80s, and the band also throws in the song "Voivod", which isn't included in the track list for some reason), awesome apocalyptic alien road warrior stage banter from Snake, the audio quality is TITS. Last up is a forty-nine minute set at Fender's Ballroom in Long Beach, CA in December '88. For whatever reason, they had to cut their set a little short for this show, so no "Tribal Convictions" or "Chaosmongers". Another solid overhead shot zoomed in on the band from the back, the sound quality is righteous, and for a change of pace, the fog machines are set to full blast.

The supplementary slideshows are Artwork (1987-88) and Live And Studio Photos (1987-88) , both filled with loads of amazing archival art and photography.

Essential for Voivod devotees, obviously. An absolute cornucopia of innovative and truly unique music and material from this era of the band's incredible career.