“It’s prog time, baby. Having only dipped my metal-shod toes in my favorite genre a handful of times this year, I made a concerted effort to get ahead of my coworkers in October and indulge me of some progressive metal.” The early bird gets the noodle.
The prospect of a new Voivod record is something I approached with a fair amount of dread, mostly due to the minor detail that guitarist/bandleader Denis “Piggy” D’Amour passed away back in 2005. A lot of ’80s/’90s bands have buried their dead and moved on, occasionally with decent results (see: Alice In Chains). But Piggy seemed irreplaceable. He was the band’s main songwriter by most accounts, and more importantly, he possessed one of the weirdest, most eccentric guitar styles in all of metal. It seemed that no one could possibly take his place.
