Back to the Futuristic : Voivod’s ‘The Outer Limits,’ the Group’s 8th Album, Is Inspired by the Sci-Fi of a More Innocent Time

You expect rock musicians to put a lot of energy into building their record collections.

But Michel Langevin of Voivod has crammed his home with books and paraphernalia that express his fascination with science and science fiction. That won’t come as a big surprise to Voivod’s fans: The French-Canadian progressive-metal band has been preoccupied with the futuristic and the otherworldly throughout its eight-album career.

Langevin, Voivod’s drummer and chief shaper of themes and cover-art ideas, chuckled when asked whether his sci-fi collection eclipses his musical stash.

“I’ve got a few records and CDs,” he said recently from Phoenix, where Voivod was about to launch its first tour of the United States in three years--including a show tonight at the Marquee in Westminster. “My house is full of toys. Robots and flying saucers, a lot of old books and pulp magazines like Amazing Stories, but also new science magazines like Omni,” he said.

Voivod emerged on record in the mid-1980s, playing dense, thrashy music inspired by its admiration of such speed-metal precursors as Motorhead. Since then, like a kindred band, Metallica, Voivod has honed its skills and widened its scope.

Singer Denis Belanger has added a fair amount of tunefulness to his screaming, and Denis D’Amour, a sharp, hard-edge guitar player, can spin off licks inspired by classical music and jazz-fusion as well as the old speed-metal locomotive rumble.

Along with heavy metal, Voivod is heavily influenced by such British progressive-rockers as Pink Floyd and King Crimson. Its repertoire includes striking cover versions of a couple of Floyd nuggets that mesh with its own sci-fi interests: “Astronomy Domine,” Syd Barrett’s bleak vision of the universe, and “The Nile Song,” a spooky Roger Waters composition that appears on Voivod’s latest album, “The Outer Limits.”

At a time when science fiction, especially on film, draws on the latest in computer-generated imagery to produce new spectacles of speculation, Langevin says Voivod’s new album is a deliberate throwback to a more innocent and technologically backward time in the genre’s history.

He cites the ‘60s-vintage TV series “The Outer Limits” as the initial spark that lit his enduring interest in science fiction.

“Every album we try to have a special direction,” the 30-year-old Quebec native said in good but heavily French-accented English. “For this one we decided to give a pulp-magazine feeling to the album cover. We had to reach this naive feeling and give it to the album. In the past we wrote a lot about cyber-punk and the science that was happening in the ‘80s and ‘90s, and we didn’t want to repeat ourselves.”

Songs including “Fix My Heart” and “Moonbeam Rider,” which lead off the album, capture the yearning for an escape from the mundane that forms the foundation for science fiction.

On the second-to-last song, “Wrong Way Street,” Voivod sees itself trapped and alienated in a world that’s all too down-to-earth (Langevin said it was inspired by watching the Los Angeles riots on television and by a house burglary that cost D’Amour his guitars).

“We Are Not Alone” brings things to a triumphant close. In the Voivod equivalent of the final scene of “Close Encounters of the Third Kind,” the band envisions contact with alien beings, caring not a whit that “they are green and ugly.” Instead, the rockers proclaim: “God, we are so lucky / We’re not alone.”

Voivod’s three founding members all grew up in Jonquiere, a town about 200 miles north of Montreal that Langevin said is home to the largest aluminum factory in North America.

Langevin, whose father worked in the factory, decided early on that he wanted no part of the local industry. “At school we had a few visits there, and I hated it. It was built during the Second World War and it was really old and ugly.”

Instead, he enrolled in a local college.

“I studied nuclear physics, but after realizing that if you’re in nuclear physics you build lasers, weapons and stuff like that, I dropped out.” By then, Voivod had been launched, and Langevin decided to dedicate himself to the band.

Voivod, which came together in 1982, moved to Montreal in 1985. According to Langevin, the band received little support in its home province--partly because its speed-metal style wasn’t easily accepted, but mainly because French-language partisans in Quebec looked askance at its decision to write songs in English.

“They were making jokes because we were singing in English. We were never put on festivals,” he said. “But the music we listened to was English, and we wanted to tour the world.

“If you sing in French,” he said, “you’re restricted to Quebec, France and Switzerland, if you’re lucky. It’s only after getting successful in the United States and Europe that we started getting recognition in Quebec.”

Langevin said that Voivod’s recent albums each have sold a respectable 150,000 to 200,000 copies worldwide--but the band has visions of elaborate computer-aided stage shows that would require a far bigger bankroll than its moderate success will allow.

For now, Voivod tours with simpler visuals, including an old-fashioned psychedelic light show employing an overhead projector.

“To be successful as an artist, you need to sell more than 250,000 (copies apiece). Then you can have your house, your car,” he said. “Under that, you have money in your pocket, but you don’t have money in the bank.”

Langevin noted that when Voivod last toured the United States in 1990, its opening acts were Soundgarden and Faith No More, two bands that subsequently became major successes. Voivod--which now includes a newly appointed bassist, Gilles Brisebois--would like to follow the pattern of outsider hard-rock bands that have gained mass followings.

“The last couple albums we learned to write a good, catchy song. It’s really important nowadays. Alternative acts are in the Top 40. They all have catchy songwriting, and we had to catch up with that,” Langevin said. “Our guitar player writes most of the music, and I think he’s really developed over the last few albums.”

If Voivod does make it big, Langevin would like to plant himself and his science-fiction collection on a large spread of American terra firma and ride around it on conveyances that are decidedly terrestrial.

“We all want a ranch somewhere in Texas or Arizona or Colorado. A ranch and a horse and a Harley-Davidson.”

* Voivod, Damn the Machine, Vagrant, Prophecy Oxydizer and Marshall Coleman play tonight at 8 p.m. at the Marquee, 7000 Garden Grove Blvd., Westminster; $12 in advance, $14 at the door. (714) 891-1430.

* Times Link (714) 549-9898. To hear a sample of Voivod’s new CD, “The Outer Limits,” call TimesLink and press * 5560