Question for everyone who ranked Nothingface at #1: do you think that album has anything to 'say' besides just being off-kilter and alien? Don't get me wrong, I love the album, but I'm torn between thinking it's their best album (there really isn't a single weak track on it, and the way it makes their weird-ass angular style sound like the most obvious, accessible thing in the world is truly astonishing) and also not finding it as emotionally resonant as either their more overtly horror-tinged and dystopian previous albums, or their more introspective later albums.
Bit late replying, but I agree with CiG's comments on this one.
Voivod can be really hard to get a read on at times because of the often dissonant, jarring coldness found within their music.
Nothingface is no different in that respect, but it is a lot more prog/post-punk influenced compared to their earlier stuff.
It does have something to say but at that point in time it was vastly different to a lot of Metal, which was often a bit more 'traditional' in its themes. And by 'traditional' I'm thinking of themes based around the grand narratives found through art in history like 'heroism', 'glory' 'bravery' and the ideals that spring out of these, or alternatively the more rock inspired hedonistic / social rebellion themes about Metal as a sub-culture. The biggest problem with these themes is that in lesser hands they are dumbed down, commercialised and/or turned into mere cliches.
What Voivod did was similar to Metal was similar to what the post-punk movement did as a response to punk. They ripped up the rule book and became subversive to both the cultural meta-themes and the song-writing approach. To understand Voivod I think it really helps to have a bit of an understanding to the post-modern condition and by that I mean the disillusion and alienation that arose out of the ashes of the Great Wars of the first half of the 20th Century. Most of the grand meta-narratives of Western society (Christian values, Victorian values, the old values of glory, bravery, heroism) were completely turned on their heads by the onset of both industrialisation and the proliferation of technology, capitalism and of course the threat of nuclear annihilation.
Voivod is cold and unemotional because at the very core of our existence is a void that is yet to be replaced because the world has changed and the old values have slipped away. Real beauty does shine through in the moments when we understand that this predicament is not necessarily an end-state, but a clean-slate, and via introspection/reflection, new moods, new music, and new values can arise.
