Voivod's Piggy Lives On Katorz

When Denis "Piggy" D'Amour, guitarist of influential Quebec sci-fi thrashers Voivod, died from cancer complications last August, the axe legend left behind enough guitar tracks for the band to create up to three more albums. The first of these is now complete and set for a June release on The End Records.

The record is called Katorz, signifying that it's the bilingual band's 14th album. Its construction was novel, to say the least.

"The first time I sang, put on the headphones, and I heard Piggy's playing, I thought, 'Oh my God, this is going to be tough," recalls lead vocalist Snake of the album's early recording stages. "There's all this pressure of delivering, to honour your friend, and you've got to visualize the whole thing together.

"It has to sound like we're playing together. These are recordings from way back, but you've got to make it live.

"When Piggy got sick, I had already done the sketches of all the songs, not only those 10. There were 23 songs on the demo originally. These songs will be released later on. But I didn't change a lot of things since Piggy's death because I thought everything was there. All the sketches were there."

"Because of producer Glen Robinson's major involvement, the sound of [Voivod's 1989 album] Nothingface was very apparent," says bassist Jason "Jasonic" Newsted (ex-Metallica) of the way Katorz links the band's distant and recent [the group's 2003 self-titled release] past with the present.

"Snake got a whole lot of time to get his lyrics together, formulate the way he that he wanted to weave his shit into it. He's a very different kind of vocalist. The album that we made in 2003, Snake didn't have as much time to put his vocals together. We were just piecing it together, and he did some of the writing as he was singing it. So that punk element was there. This time he had a long, long time to put it together. He had recording devices at home. He could choose effects that he wanted.

"This record was built very much in pieces. I don't know if you know the whole story, but the bass was done through a 10-watt amplifier on my porch, and Piggy's guitar stuff was done in his bathroom in his apartment. For it to sound like it does after being pieced together like it was... it is far, far, far beyond a glorified demo, which is what I thought it was going to be.

"It is a fucking serious, weighty, heavy metal album. Contemporary, yet the experience and the maturity shines through like a motherfucker. Very unorthodox. The credit has to go to [drummer] Michel [Langevin], Snake and Glen for following through with this. Because my part in this stuff, as far as the bass...

"Piggy had come out for a couple of weeks at a couple of different times, and he had just gotten the new Mac, and I plugged into that, and he said, 'Are you ready? OK, go.' And we did the bass tracks. I wasn't even close to being in the mode I get in when recording a real album. I'm just sitting on the porch in my rocking chair with iced tea going, 'You cool with that?' 'Yeah.' 'OK, next.' And it still goes, 'Rrrrooooaaaarrrr!' So explain that."