In the Beginning...They were good friends who wanted to be in a band. Unfortunately they couldn’t play any cool instruments (recorder and trombone don’t score high on the babe-o-meter or necessarily lead to world domination). Still, things were good because they were infused with youth and afire with enthusiasm. Much like herpes the latter proved contagious and soon talented people with musical ability were invited (or blackmailed) to join the side-project known as Voltaire’s Bastards. Their first jam space was in the trailer of an eighteen wheeler located in an industrial park. They shared it with an assortment of used carpets and industrial machinery. The hardships were many. It was unheated and poorly insulated making winter jams gruelling. Necessity being the mother of invention, band members soon discovered that drinking lots of beer quickly numbed the pain of frostbite, although it didn’t do much for tuning or timing. But then, that’s why God invented distortion, right? And the distortion was good.From there the band moved in-doors; right into a vegetable warehouse where they set up their jam space and exercised their burgeoning talents on top of a walk-in freezer. All agreed that it was better to play on, rather than in, a freezer. Real Jobs, Higher Education, Girls, Life and Other Distractions...Then it all got messy and complicated. While things may have improved materially for band members, the sense of collective focus became somewhat diffused. People got their own apartments, some got good paying jobs, one went back to school, and the good looking one moved to the West Coast. PS2 came out with what were, at the time, whack graphics and KOTOR ruled code-monkey land. Beer was plentiful. A new band member was drafted, an EP released, breweries were drunk dry, neo-cons tried to take over the world, the cooch-flashing craze while getting out of cars came and went, as did girlfriends, and the world generally went to hell. Despite the chaotic mess of busy, distracted lives the Sonic Muse chose not forsake these most wayward of her children. The reward for her uncalled for devotion and faith – No Happy Ending, a distortion drenched explosion of VB attitude, laced with biting vitriol, leavened with unexpected doses of hope – arrived unexpectedly, erupting from the oblivion the band had slipped into, b**ch-smacking unsuspecting, neglected fans and converting the unwashed. Voltaire’s Bastards has risen from near-death and delivered a crushing kick to the crotch of its detractors. No Happy Ending proves that the creative process still churns within the band, much diminished perhaps, reduced from a metaphoric torrent to a trickle, but still vital, still dynamic, and still corrosively potent; a poison in the ear, digging for the brain.