Noise, Politics, Cyberpunk at Four-Band Thrashfest

There are certain assumptions you can make about a thrash-metal revue. Strata of speakers will peel off as each band finishes its set, so that the openers have only a slender strip of apron while the headliners have the entire stage on which to flip their hair. If you’re familiar with the genre only from MTV, you won’t recognize the names on any of the T-shirts and all the lyrics will sound pretty much like this to you: “wuh-wuh-wuh-wuh- wuh.” And the band that gets booed will invariably turn out to be closest to the godhead.

At the Santa Monica Civic’s sold-out thrashfest on Saturday starring Testament, the loudest band in the world (recently reviewed in the Times), Wrathchild America added a smidgen of blues to the standard head-in-a-cement-mixer formula, and New York-based Nuclear Assault--as subtle as its name implies--stirred in a dram of politics.

Voivod was booed. But even within thrash circles, Voivod fans are thought a little strange, the way guys who preferred “Ummagumma”-era Pink Floyd to the Beatles were. Voivod is modal, rhythmically complex (it’s been known to quote great swatches of the “Rite of Spring”) and lyrically weird: Its heavy-metal cyberpunk runs rhetorical rings around “Neuromancer.” Above tight, dissonant polyrhythms, singer Snake’s voice floated, sometimes a Brechtian snarl, sometimes a Brian Ferry croon. Voivod’s techno-thrash takes metal in a new direction as surely as Metallica did.