I’ll be honest: when I first heard that Voivod had recorded a live album with the Quebec Symphony Orchestra, my expectations weren’t particularly high.
Not because of Voivod. More because these kinds of projects usually end up feeling unnecessary. Too often, the orchestra is reduced to expensive background decoration while the band carries on as normal.
Symphonique turned out to be a pleasant surprise.
What struck me almost immediately was that the orchestra actually sounds involved. The arrangements don’t feel like an afterthought, and there were several moments where I found myself paying more attention to the strings and brass than to the guitars. That’s not something I expected going in.
The other thing that became obvious fairly quickly is how naturally Voivod‘s music lends itself to this sort of treatment. Thinking about it now, maybe it shouldn’t be surprising. Their songs have always had an odd sense of space and movement to them. Even on the older records, there was often something cinematic lurking beneath all the noise and dissonance. Symphonique simply brings more of that to the surface.
The setlist helps. Rather than relying entirely on obvious crowd-pleasers, the band pulls material from different eras of its career, and some choices benefit from the orchestral setting more than others. A few songs suddenly sound much larger than I remembered them. Others take on a slightly different character altogether.
One thing I kept coming back to was Snake’s voice. Before hearing this, I honestly wondered whether all the orchestral stuff would end up swallowing it. It never really does. If anything, I noticed the vocals more than usual on a few tracks. Maybe it’s because the arrangements leave more space than I expected. Whatever the reason, it works.
The live aspect comes through, too. That’s another thing I wasn’t entirely convinced about beforehand. A lot of modern live releases sound so cleaned up that you stop thinking of them as live albums after ten minutes. Here I never completely lost that feeling that there was an actual room full of people listening to this happen.
A couple of songs left me less convinced. Not because they’re bad, but because I occasionally missed some of the roughness from the studio versions. Voivod have always had this slightly scrappy, unpredictable quality, and every now and then the orchestra smooths over some of those edges.
Then again, a few minutes later another arrangement would come along and I’d forget about that complaint.
By the end of the album I wasn’t really thinking about whether the orchestra was a good idea anymore. I was mostly thinking about the songs themselves, which is probably a good sign. The novelty wears off pretty quickly. What’s left is a bunch of Voivod material viewed from a different angle.
Some experiments spend their entire runtime trying to justify their existence. This one stopped feeling like an experiment somewhere around the middle of the set.
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