"I think that I'm in a band now that can kick their (Metallica's) ass." said Jason Newsted in a December interview with MTV. Not being familiar with Voivod's older music, I was kind of geeked when I saw Jason's comments. Metallica hasn't been kicking too much ass lately, but their albums have still been decent to listen to, so I figured if Voivod's new effort sounded slightly better than Re-load, it might be a decent album.

My first taste of the album came from the 3 songs posted at MP3.com ("We Carry On", "Rebel Robot", and "Gasmask Revival"). It was a taste that I wasn't too fond of to be quite honest. The singer, "Snake", has an uninspiring voice that reminds me of Bruce Dickinson when he's hitting the low notes. Snake however, lacks the range of Bruce and frankly, that's not a good thing. The guitar work and music in general doesn't sound too bad, but it's not very dynamic either and tends to get boring after a while.

The sound quality of this album itself sounds like it was recorded in some dudes basement and they forgot to adjust the levels when they went to mix the album. Sometimes this can be refreshing, especially in an era of over-produced albums, but there were times that it sounded like poor Snake's voice was being drowned out. (then again, that really might not be a bad thing.) I thought with the musical background that Jason Newsted possesses that he would at least want to put an album that sounded good if even the music itself doesn't.

Voivod sounds like a mid-1980's metal band that never evolved or grew up in terms of music. While other bands from that period (Sepultura, Metallica, Megadeth to name a few), experimented and tried to upgrade their sound (even if it ended up sounding worse in the long run), many bands such as Voivod decided to stay the course and keep making the same album over and over again (take notes Slayer and Pantera). With that being said, I can see how fans from this period of metal will like this album and probably call me an idiot for liking nu-metal bands, but not this album. For this reason, I gave it a 2 rating instead of the 1 that I was going to give it. This album is going to make a certain group of people very happy. It doesn't make it a good album though.

SHORTSTICK’S LAST WORD: I had honestly never heard of Voivod until Jason Newsted joined them. I guess my era of metal (starting in early 90s, after the hair band phenomenon had ended) sort of skipped past this band. They sort of seem to be from a generation of metal that happened a few years before my time. It wasn’t really my intention to thrash this album when I first heard it, because I wish no ill will towards Jason, but I guess I was kind of letdown (my gripes are already well documented).