Voivod - Jack Luminous

Here at Rock Song of the Week, we’re not afraid to throw our dear listeners right in at the deep end. How will you ever learn to swim without being thrown in the ocean? Turns out there’s a bunch of ways, and my grandfather might have been using me to try and find sunken treasure and/or drown me. But while we’re on the topic of the deep end; if you’ve never heard of Voivod, Canada’s answer to the question “what if Rush lived down the road and also liked thrash“, then buckle up, buckaroo, because here’s twenty minutes or so of them. 

Their mix of the low and slow genre arms of prog and psychadaelia is offset, sometimes explosively so, by their speed metal roots and their proclivity for a little bit of thrash every now and again. The end result is a thoroughly unique sound made up of lots of comfortingly familiar hallmarks that really hits that pleasure centre in the ol’ brainbox. Don’t just take our word for it, though, because there’s a whole laundry list of bands that call on Voivod as an influence. Included in that list is Meshuggah; which might explain some of their fascination with time signatures now I think about. 

There are few reasons to use the word epic when it comes to a lot of tracks, but Jack Luminous might just be one use case we can all agree on. A swirling, soaring monster that’s not afraid to get down and dirty too, it’s the best use of seventeen minutes since cooking a deep pan pizza and just as satisfyingly filling. Hopefully you get more than fifteen minutes for lunch, because if the choice comes down to skipping two minutes of this or being given your marching orders, we’d trust you to make the right choice. Being sent home just means you’ll get to listen to it as many times as you want!