Reevaluating War and Pain by Voivod

Tastes change over time.  That is not a controversial statement.  For instance, I once considered Coal Chamber one of my favorite bands.  Now, I cannot even listen to them.  Which brings me to a less stark change.  My tastes in Voivod's music.

I have been a big fan of Voivod for some time now, even though I got into them very late.  They were always on the periphery of my musical tastes.  I liked Negatron since it was the first album I picked up by the band in the mid 1990's, but I never got much into their earlier material other than songs like "Killing Technology" and "Astronomy Domine" appearing on a couple of compilations I owned.  Much later, I finally picked up Nothingface and grew to love the album.  Then, I went through a period of time where I started to check out everything Voivod ever did.  The first five albums are legendary (and rival any other band's five album run) and quickly became my absolute favorites.  Of the five, Dimension Hatross became my preferred album because it combined the raw thrash metal of Voivod's early material and saw the band headed in the progressive direction they perfected on Nothingface.  I still like Negatron, but nowhere near as much.  But this is not about Negatron's place in Voivod's history.  It is about War and Pain.

Of the first five Voivod albums, I previously considered War and Pain the band's weakest.  That is not terribly surprising as it was the band's debut album and was incredibly raw and almost sloppy.  It contained few, if any, hints of what the band would later accomplish upon incorporating prog rock elements.  Quite frankly, listening to War and Pain back to back with Nothingface, it is difficult to tell that it is even the same band. 

Something has changed recently.  I have no idea what, but upon repeated listens to the band's discography, it has been War and Pain that I have been going back to time and time again.  What I once heard as sloppy has become endearing and just a sign of a very young and raw band doing the best they could with what they knew at the time.  Several of these songs have become favorites of mine, including "Blower", "Warriors of Ice" and "Iron Gang".  There is a lot of punk influence here that adds to the raw, unrefined sound of the band and makes it that much more intriguing. 

Honestly, picking out a favorite Voivod album is very difficult.  The band has changed so much over the decades they have been around that almost every album is truly unique in some way that sets it apart from any other Voivod album.  That is what is so interesting about this band in the first place.  They were never content to just put out album after album of the same stuff.  And so even though War and Pain has risen in my eyes, who knows if it will stay in such a lofty place?