The new Sovereign album is good (plus a Voivod tangent)

By Pete Brown

I was checking out this new Sovereign album Altered Realities. I hadn’t listened to any of their stuff before, but it’s pretty good and I found that it put me in mind of Voivod, kind of prog/thrash-inflected death metal.

That thought then sent me along to looking at Voivod’s catalog and it turns out they came out with an album last year. I have spent zero time checking out the band’s recent bios, but I feel like maybe one of them died and they’ve had some other turnover in recent years, so I have no idea to what degree they are the same band I used to listened to.

This new album from them is okay but about halfway through the second track, I realized it really sounded like they were trying to make a Motörhead album and if I want to hear something that sounds like Motörhead, I will just go listen to some Motörhead.

So then I stopped it and put on Dimension Hatröss and was reminded of just how great both that album and Nothingface are.

All of which is to say that if you are in the mood for a pretty good contemporary on technical/progressive thrash, you could do a lot worse than this new Sovereign record.