SOUNDTRACK: VOIVOD-Lost Society (2020).
Voivod have been around for over 30 years. In that time, they’ve releases only four lives albums. The first one was from the period when their original and current singer had departed, so that doesn’t really count. In 2011 they released Warriors of Ice, a live album that featured the reunited original lineup minus deceased guitarist Piggy. The third was a limited release from the 2011 Roadburn Festival.
Thus, we have this new release to acknowledge the excellence of their 2018 album The Wake. This show was recorded at Quebec City Summer Fest on July 13, 2019. I saw them on this tour on April 5, 2019. The setlist was largely the same, although they played more in their hometown (and I would have loved to see “Astronomy Domine”).
Being in front of a hometown crowd has the band fully energized. It also allows Snake to speak French to the audience, which is fun.
Most of Voivod’s music is really complicated and difficult (the chords that Piggy and now Chewy came up with are pretty hard to imagine). And yet they play everything perfectly. There’s not a lot of room for jamming when the songs are this tight and complex, but it’s clear the band are enjoying themselves anyway.
Since this is touring their new album, the majority of songs (4) are from it with two more songs from their 2016 EP Post Society. The rest of the set is pretty much a song from each of the albums prior to 1993 (excluding the album with the best name: Rrröööaaarrr).
They interfile the new songs with the older ones, and it feels really seamless. This shows how much of a student of Piggy new guitarist Chewy turned out to be.
The few times that Snake speaks in English, he says that Angel Rat’s “The Prow” is “time to dance time to party have fun” something one wouldn’t expect to do at a Voivod show, but compared to their other songs, it is pretty dancey.
My favorite Voivod album (aside from The Wake, which is really outstanding) is Nothingface, so I was really excited to hear “Into My Hypercube” and to hear that Rocky’s bass sounded just right.
Their older stuff is a little less complex and proggy so a song like 1987’s “Overreaction” is a bit heavier and straight ahead.
One of the more entertaining moments is during the opening of “The Lost Machine” where Snake stands between Chewy and Rocky and waves his arms to strum the chords first guitar, then bass, then guitar then bass, etc.
It is strange to think that this is only one-half of the classic line up. In fact, drummer Away is the only person to have never left the band. I assumed that when Piggy died, there was no point in continuing, but these replacements were really great.
And, Snake makes sure we never forget Piggy. They end every show with the song that has the same name as the band. And before they play it, he starts a chant “Piggy! Piggy!” In this live recording, you can hear the audience screaming along to “voivod,” a nonsensical word that remains strong thirty-five years on.
The setlist for the album is at the bottom of the post. I sure hope they tour around here again someday.
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I don’t recall when I started watching Red Dwarf–some time in the 90s, I suspect. I don’t even know if the show was ever very poplar here in the States, so it’s kind of a surprise that these two Red Dwarf novels even had a U.S. release. But they did. And I bought them (and read them, I think, although it’s all new to me 30 years later) sometime when they came out.
So Grant Naylor is the cleverly combined names of Rob Grant and Doug Naylor–back when they were working together (I’m not sure why one of them left). They penned two Red Dwarf books together, then they each wrote a Red Dwarf book separately.
This first one is basically an expanded version of some of the episodes from the first and second season.
Most of the jokes from the episodes are present here–so it’s easy to picture the characters saying the lines. But there’s also a ton of new stuff. Much of it fleshes out things that happened in the show, but still other things are brand new.
The book starts with the death of a Red Dwarf crew member. He is now a hologram and rather than being excited about being alive, he is horrified to think of all the things his wife will get up to now that he is dead but aware of what is happening. We also meet another man who is about to die–this time by suicide. He is in debt for a lot of money and decided it was better than being beaten to death by the men he owed money to.
Turns out, this man outranked the first man and since the Red Dwarf mining ship could only support one hologram, this man was brought back at the expense of the first one. A lot of ground is covered in these first two chapters and we haven’t even met any of the main characters of the show yet.
Dave Lister comes along in Chapter 3. For those unfamiliar with the show, Dave Lister is the main character and also the last human being alive. In the show he is three million years into deep space. But he had been in stasis so he is only 27 when he is brought out and told the news that everyone is dead.
But as the book starts, Lister is miserable on a planet Mimas. He got really drunk at his birthday party in Liverpool and, by the end of the night, he was on a planet very far from home with no money to get back.
He meets Arnold Rimmer, the other main character, on this planet. Lister has stolen a cab and Rimmer had hailed the cab. Rimmer is a pretentious git, so when he asks to be taken to the red light district, he absolutely denies that he’s going there for anything other than the food. Lister has some fun at his expense, and he certainly won’t forget his face (even with the false mustache).
With no money to get off of the planet, Lister decides to sign up with the Jupiter Mining Company for a five year stint in outer space. He figures the ship will head to earth and he’ll just go AWOL. He did not realize they were heading right out into deep space–there would be no escape. Since Lister has no skills, he is hired as the lowest of the low–third technician. He does the jobs that are too lowly even for the mechanoids. Worse still, his superior technician is Arnold Rimmer.
There are some hilarious jokes throughout this section at Rimmer’s expense and at the preposterousness of the whole scene. Their writing translated perfectly into print.
The end of the human race happens pretty suddenly. But first they need to get Lister into stasis. He hated doing the drudge work on board the ship and decided it would be better to just pause his life for three years–he would get no pay, but he also wouldn’t age. The least dangerous thing he could do to get into stasis was to bring an unquarantined animal aboard. So he bought a cat on a shore leave and snuck it aboard ship. It’s hilarious how he was caught with the cat. But since he won’t reveal the location of the cat, he is put into stasis.
The cat, meanwhile, has secreted herself into the air vents and the levels way below deck that have all the food. She’s also pregnant.
When a radiation leak happens aboard the ship, all the crew is killed. But the leak never makes it to where the cat is. The ships computer, Holly, who has an IQ of 6,000, sent the ship into deep space so it could not harm anyone or anything. And there they floated for 3 million years.
During that time Lister hasn’t aged. But the cat has. And her offspring has evolved. The show never delves into this, so it’s fun to see how they imagined a cat evolving into the character known as The Cat–a humanoid with sharp teeth and a tremendous amount of vanity. The book explains that all of the cats had a huge fight over religion and they all left on their separate quests for divine inspiration. They left only the dumb and the feeble. Hence, The Cat.
How does Rimmer survive? He didn’t. He is revived as the ship’s hologram. Holly believed that Rimmer was the only person aboard ship that would keep Lister sane. Lister wished it was anyone else, but especially Kristine Kochanski, the woman he dated for five weeks before she dumped him for a higher ranking guy (but who Lister is helplessly in love with). However, Holly felt that Rimmer had shared far more words with Rimmer (true, most of those words were fights, but whatever), so he brought him back.
Of course, after three million years, Holly has gone a bit peculiar–computer senile, perhaps. And his intelligence mixed with what he has forgotten provides a lot of the humor (some of which is based on 20th century Britain, so it doesn’t always translate–who the hell is Kevin Keegan? [That was something I couldn’t easily find out back in the early 90s, now it’s a simple search to find out that he was a football player and manager and did indeed write the book Football It’s a Funny Old Game].
There some scenes from the episode “Future Echoes” in which pieces of the future pop into their ship–with typically humorous results. Especially since Rimmer sees Lister blow up while trying to fix the very problem that the ship is having.
It can’t have been easy trying to make all of the parts from separate episodes fit into a coherent narrative for the book, but they do a good job. I like how the future echo shows a tattoo U=BTL on the older Lister–this comes into great use later on when Lister’s life seems to be going all to well.
Half way through the book we also meet Kryten. Kryten only came onto the show in Season 2, it’s hard to believe. So they must have written that episode before this book. Anyhow, Kryten is a service droid. He is a mechanoid who serves on the Nova 5. We watch as his need to clean causes serious trouble on the ship. But more importantly, we see Kryten’s SOS signal has called Red Dwarf to rescue the crew on the Nova 5. Maybe Lister isn’t the last human after all.
Except that it has been three million years, so of course they are dead. Amusingly so. The Red Dwarf crew takes Kryten with them and he becomes part of the crew.
Kryten’s ship also had a hologram replicator. Rimmer tries to revive any of the Nova 5 ‘s crew, but al the discs were damaged. So he does the next best thing, he makes a copy of himself and moves in with himself. This is the episode “Me2” and it is almost exactly like the episode, but with a bit more nastiness.
Lister also realizes that the Nova 5 had a Duality Drive, This drive allows you to be in two places at once ; you would then pick the place where you wanted to land, so you could jump across dimensions with ease. They just needed some fuel for it So Lister found a planet where he could mine the uranium and he set to work, with the two most hopeless helpers–Cat and Kryten.
They are about to head back to Earth, but they can only have one hologram, so there is a coin toss to see which Rimmer gets shut off–original or new and improved. This gets us to the meaning behind the whole Gazacho soup fiasco (a very important thing in Rimmer’s life in the early days).
Part three sees the crew returning to Earth. Lister is living in Bedfred Falls, just like his favorite movie It’s a Wonderful Life. While Rimmer has made a ton of money with his high tech adventures and is an amazing mansion. The Cat is also in a bizarre land only his warped mind could create.
Everything is perfect, too perfect. It’s only when Lister realizes that everything is too perfect that he understands that somehow they got sucked into the game Better Than Life–a fully immersive video gave that rewards your every deserve. A game that it is impossible to get out of, so your body just rots while you are happier than you’ve ever been.
How do you leave a game designed to make you never want to leave?
And how can you end a book based on a TV show that more or less follows the TV show on a cliffhanger that doesn’t happen in the TV show?
To be continued…
~~~~~
The Voivod setlist
Songs in bold were not played at my show. My show was actually three bands, so Voivod’s set was shortened (they weren’t even the headliner!)
- Post Society ¶
- Psychic Vacuum ⊗
- Obsolete Beings ϖ
- The Prow ®
- Iconspiracy ϖ
- Into My Hypercube Ö
- The End of Dormancy ϖ
- Overreaction ¥
- Always Moving ϖ
- Fall ¶
- The Lost Machine ⇔
- Astronomy Domine Ö
- Voivod ∇
∇ War and Pain (1984)
¥ Killing Technology (1987)
⊗ Dimension Hatross (1988)
Ö Nothingface (1989)
® Angel Rat (1991)
⇔ The Outer Limits (1993)
¶ Post-Society (2016)
ϖ The Wake (2018)
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