Voivod: War and Pain 27th Anniversary!!!!!

Today marks the 27th anniversary of the release of Voivod’s first album War and Pain. I might put that album at number one for best rock and roll albums ever made. The only competition for it really is Joy Division’s album Closer.
There’s a bunch of metal that is pretty good. Voivod is good. Celtic Frost is good. The book Lords of Chaos is an excellent book and if you go back into the Norwegian bands in it, the bands that burned down the churches, those were some pretty good bands. The Metalhit Free Download Series released in late 2010-2011 has some great material on it, although if you go back and do some research on the bands on it, a whole bunch of them are Neo-Nazis. It’s still nearly six hours of great music. And I am excited about the Metallica/Lou Reed collaboration, as I’ve written many times on here.
I’m usually far too kind to bands on here seeing as how perpetually boring the whole topic of bands and the whole social activity of going to see them is. Almost as soon as I give a band a good review, I will regret it. Such is the case with a review I wrote of Big Star’s Third: Sister Lovers, that I wrote for the reasons that a.) I mentioned it elsewhere and it got a bunch of hits and b) back in the 90’s my ex-girlfriend Jane Rose hated it. War and Pain though, I still like that one. The first time I heard it (not the first time I’d heard Voviod) was 1990, my older brother found it in a bargain bin with 4 other Voivod albums all on super-discount. I rediscovered the album when I was 25. Other bands from the time have not aged as well, I don’t find myself downloading much Helloween, for example.
So for those who haven’t heard this album, what is it like? It’s pretty simple really, brutal early thrash metal with apocalyptic science fiction themes. They’re from Quebec. They where famous for bringing elements of the punk music of the time into metal. War and Pain was there first album, subsequent albums they used a whole of tricks with guitar pedals, but the sound on War and Pain is very hard and straight. That’s all you really need.