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.

Essential for Voivod devotees, obviously. An absolute classic of innovative 1980s metal.