Newsted Says Voivod Singer "Like Yoda"

Quebec frontiersmen Voivod are gearing up for the most momentous release of their 20-year career.

The album, cryptically titled The Multiverse and set for a March 4, 2003 release, marks the return of celebrated vocalist Denis "Snake" Belanger and the addition of bassist Jason Newsted, who was once with a band you might have heard of called Metallica.

With the album in the can (much of it tracked at The Chophouse, Newsted's home studio) and mixing set for early December, the bassist is over the moon and detectably more hyper in his speech than the guy who chatted up the ill-fated Echobrain project of a few months back.

"Forward," yelps Newsted when asked about the musical direction of the new material. "I think that a very logical conclusion is that it sounds exactly like Metallica meets Voivod.

"I have retained the distortion, the constant bass distortion — a little tighter — but it's still there for Voivod the way it always was as far as Voivod goes. But, added to it, is the girth of the Metallica bass, the Black Album bass sound, those kinds of things that sound huge, huge, huge — an enveloping low end. So both things exist, something that was never there before for a Voivod album.

"Everything else is still intact. Drumming is still fucking crazy, double bass drums every song, Snake is back a full 110 per cent and Piggy's fucked up tunings, Piggy chords exclusive to Piggy — all of that is still absolutely alive."

Snake, in leaving Voivod, literally — and quite dramatically — went into the woods with his girlfriend, both battling addictions, both doing "absolutely nothing" until they emerged renewed. Newsted and drummer Michel "Away" Langevin both provided lyrical grist, but Snake ran the show this time.

"It's his own thing because of the translation from French," explains an amused Newsted on Snake's style. "The direct translation cuts through all the shit.

"The thing is that no person that speaks English as their first language would write it that way because of the way we've been programmed. And when we hear it back so plainly, it's kind of like Yoda-speak, but way more intelligent. Because he doesn't use the little in between words that you would know from knowing the English language first — 'ands' and 'ares' and all these things — he goes boom, boom, boom. All the words next to each other, they can create sentences and/or phrases that mean five different things.

"On one of his best vocal performances, he says 'It's so good to see you again.' And I know what he means and we all know what he means. He's actually singing about the power of the music and what it does to people. But when he says that line, he's saying it to Michel, he's saying it to me, he's saying it to the crowd, he's saying it to the music, he's saying it to the microphone, he's saying it to his mind, he's saying it to the paper and pencil. I mean it's fuckin'... it's like that."