Voivod Overcome Loss Of Piggy To Carry On With Katorz

For most bands, 23 years and 14 albums would be milestones worth celebrating. They're marks that few acts, past or present, could ever lay claim to.

Unfortunately, for Montreal's Voivod, these victories came with a single, earth-shattering loss.

Denis "Piggy" D'Amour, the band's guitarist and co-founder, died in the summer of 2005 after a lengthy battle with colon cancer. Known for his propulsive playing and unique sense of dynamics, Piggy was a guitar hero the world over, revered as one of heavy metal's most gifted players. But away from the stacks, Piggy was also like family to his band's other founding members: vocalist Denis "Snake" Belanger and drummer Michel "Away" Langevin.

In spite of the obstacles, the band moved forward and managed to complete their recently released album, Katorz. The disc bears all of the earmarks of classic Voivod, but for a while the future of the album and the band itself was very much in doubt.

"For the first few weeks, we didn't know if there would be another album or whether the band would just break-up right away," says Away, speaking to ChartAttack from his home in Montreal. "Piggy's parents gave me his laptop shortly after he died — it had a lot of guitar tracks that he had been working on.

"I couldn't bring myself to listen to it for a long time. Eventually, after a couple of months, I went down to the studio to listen to what he had recorded. We were pretty amazed by the quality and the fact that these parts were pretty much finished and ready to go. It was a miracle, really."

Indeed, most of Katorz was built from the ground up with the help of producer Glenn Robinson, who had previously worked with the band on 1989's Nothingface. It wasn't easy to work in reverse, but, under the circumstances, the remaining members knew it was a challenge they needed to face.

"It was a difficult process because we typically build the songs from the drums outwards," says Away. "It's very hard to play drums over pre-recorded guitars, but Glenn helped us make this work because we knew there was never any question that Piggy's tracks and his contributions would be on this album."

In the recording of Katorz, Voivod only used about half the tracks that Piggy left behind. They'll therefore have enough for a second new album, with a tentative spring date set for a studio return.

In the meantime, there will be no shortage of Voivod material hitting shelves in the months to come. Two of the band's finest moments, 1991's Angel Rat and 1993's The Outer Limits, will be re-released by early 2007. A new DVD, DVOD-2, will also be out shortly.

If that's not enough, director Sam Dunn (Metal: A Headbanger's Journey) will soon release a new documentary on the band that details the death of Piggy and the challenges in recording Katorz.

Bassist Jason Newsted has been hanging recently with Tommy Lee and Gilby Clarke on the hit reality television program, Rock Star: Supernova. You'd think that a longtime underground act like Voivod wouldn't want one of their own yucking it up with Brooke Burke on a weekly basis. However, considering the exposure that the program afforded his band (and the emotional challenges that Voivod have recently overcome), Away isn't going to lose sleep over these kinds of matters.

"There is one thing about Jason: he is very loyal to his work. He's been wearing Voivod shirts on a couple of the shows, so it's really cool to see the name getting out to that kind of audience. We've always been, more or less, a cult act. So ever since Jason joined the band, it's done a lot to expose our music to many new people."