At the risk of being Dude On The Internet With Opinions™, I’ll profess to having strong feelings about Strapping Young Lad‘s 2005 opus, Alien. Specifically, about the version of the song “Love?” that appears on the final record.

Sometime between when Century Media sent out the sleeve-promo CDs for review and when the album was actually released, both now 19 years ago, there was an edit made to “Love?” that took out just over a minute of runtime. What’s actually missing — and yes, it is very much missing — is a section of muted chugs, a turn back to a tremolo riff and an “Awww shit/Fuck it.” The playlist above has both versions — the longer one is tacked onto the end, along with the concurrent Melvins cover “Zodiac.”

And I acknowledge that if you’ve never heard the record before, or maybe didn’t hear the original version of “Love?” as part of the original 11-song/55-minute tracklisting coming out of “Shitstorm” and going into “Shine,” then maybe it wouldn’t be such a big deal, but I’ll tell you honestly, I took the CD from the jewel case I eventually got and put it in the sleeve, and took the one from the promo and put that in the jewel case. That’s the album in my mind. The other “Love?” sounds butchered to my ears.

Having that association, and “Love?” as part of what I’ll put forward as one of metal’s most righteous opening salvos regardless of microgenre — the intro “Imperial” and “Skeksis” and “Shitstorm” merrily blasting away and running through a litany of power-declarations and complaints; to wit, the lyrics of “Shitstorm”: “And I don’t want to fight because I don’t know what’s WRONG or RIGHT/But I’ll do ANYTHING just to get some FUCKING sleep tonight/And I can’t even EAT/And I can’t even FUCKING PISS/All I’ve been doing is thinking about GOD and DEATH/Infinity” in founding guitarist/vocalist/keyboardist/producer/principle-songwriter Devin Townsend‘s trademark conversational-with-self style — all drawing up to the exhaled single word question, “love?” and the immediate snapback answer, “Children!”

And that’s where you find out what the purported shitstorm is really about. Having a baby. Underscoring all that initial tumult as Townsend, guitarist/backing vocalist Jed Simon, bassist Byron Stroud and megadrummer Gene Hoglan tore away at the fabric of the universe while dropping references to Jim Henson’s legit-terrifying-to-a-five-year-old 1986 film The Dark Crystal was insecurity about procreating, thinking about love and the power dynamics of relationships (“This love, it’s about control”), the direction of one’s life in the face of one of the most major changes one can make to it. Dude was scared having a kid would wreck is life.

Townsend‘s correspondingly brilliant solo follow-up, 2006’s Synchestra (discussed here), worked under a similar thematic and tied to Alien in its lyrics and music. The two are very much complements, but Strapping Young Lad were unto themselves in catharsis, and that’s audible in “Love?” (either version, admittedly) and the from-void screams of “Shine,” which follows and the gallop-thrash charge of “We Ride” trying to see the upside of life outside the band from within its cycles while a little bit making fun of Pantera in the solos, the way the wretched-but-funny shout at the start of “Possessions” becomes the opening line that unfolds seconds later into chugging impact and a build of tension as Townsend grapples lyrically, “Children and money and family and DEATH and TAXES and CAREER and PICKET FENCES…JUST GET OUT OF MY HEAD!!!/TAKE IT!!!/FUCK IT ALL!!!”

“Possessions” makes it even clearer early on, “”…And being HUMAN is FUCKED as it is./With all these questions of FAITH, and of…KIDS!!!/So what do you wanna do now baby???/Do you wanna have a fucking BABY?!” The answer that comes in the song is an immediate and emphatic negative. As I understand it, this is a traditionally masculine point of view — reproduction as subtracting from (your life) rather than adding to (your family) — but stereotyping it undercuts the honesty of expression throughout Alien, raw language used to convey raw feelings. Backed by a choir for its push-pull, ugh-pop hook, “Possessions” prefaces some of the more accessible turns SYL would make on their cobbled-together 2006 final LP, The New Black, but is a highlight in context as Alien plunges deeper into its second half, giving over to the acoustic-led Floydian escapism of “Two Weeks.”

Remember vacation? “What do you wanna do now, baby?/Should we take the day, maybe go to the beach?” The opening lines set the scene: easy breezy, no need to be anywhere and thus able to be everywhere. Compare it to “So what do you wanna do now, baby?” from the song before, and it’s clear there’s a different kind of life being represented here, at least in ideal. Freedom of movement and a claim to one’s own time. “Two Weeks” drifts and drones in preface to what the closing 12-minute experimentalist sample/synth excursion “Info Dump” will bring, but before the band gets there, “Thalamus” begins the culmination by returning — gradually, considering how prone the band was to plunge headfirst at this point — to the onslaught with its verse and more melodic chorus, releasing some if not all of the jaw-clench before moving into an almost operatic but still definitely metal procession and “Zen” finding its peace, such as it is, in Hoglan‘s endless double-kick and resolve, the line “Connect now and emerge” calling back to “We Ride” before it all comes to a head and gives over to “Info Dump” at the finish.

Toward the end of that extended drone piece, a machine static takes hold and is willfully abrasive — I guess after so much blowout, that’s what a blowout might sound like. I’ll admit I don’t always listen to “Info Dump” in its totality, but it’s usually a couple minutes before I realize I’m in it because Alien front-to-back leaves you so mesmerized and/or punchdrunk. As regards heavy metal, it’s one of the best records I’ve ever heard, and even before I had a kid, its tales of terror were vividly relatable. The better part of two decades later, they remain such.

I won’t attempt to summarize the varied directions of Devin Townsend‘s career since. You’re on the internet. You can look it up. But for me, while Strapping Young Lad‘s early-career industrial-metal-let’s-do-Fear–Factory-but-less-robots-and-more-personality take holds a special place, Alien is a pinnacle among several in Townsend‘s catalog. For something more recent, less aggro and perhaps working from a similarly over-the-top point of view, hit up his 2019 Empath album, though genius abounds in the discography, the label-needs-a-single “Love?” edit notwithstanding.

Either way, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

Next week is Freak Valley Festival. Flight is booked for Wednesday, but I don’t know that I’m actually going to make it. My mother was scheduled to have knee surgery this week, had to postpone, now it’s slated for — you guessed it — this coming Wednesday. The Patient Mrs.’ take was, “You seem like you could use some time standing in a field with people you like.” She is correct, but what’s a boy to do.

That trip hangs pretty much in the balance of timing. If her surgery is early in the day, I can be there to support her and my sister and then go to the airport and embark on a few days that I very much consider as supporting myself. If it’s afternoon, which it was gonna be this week, less. But my mother is in her late 70s and getting her knee replaced has been years in the making and she’s finally willing to do it because basically she can’t walk anymore, so if it’s happening, I don’t have much choice. Certainly I’ve been that selfish in the past — what’s the point of being the youngest kid if you can’t? — but this is my mother, and she is both my only remaining parent and the only one I ever connected with on any human level.

It is… complicated.

Or maybe just sad.

This is a long weekend. The Pecan is off from school today (it’s coming on 7AM, she should be up momentarily), Monday and Tuesday for an extended Memorial Day giveback of snow days worked into the calendar apparently without need because it doesn’t snow here anymore. Definitely used to. The Patient Mrs. wants to go north to her mother’s place on the beach in Connecticut — The Cottage, we call it — and either tomorrow or Sunday she’ll take the kid and head up.

At her suggestion, I’ll stay home for another day, do as much of Monday and Tuesday’s writing as I can stand, and then likely spend the rest of that day in a stoned stupor playing the already-at-100-perecent-complete Tears of the Kingdom, slaughtering Lynels and picking mushrooms in pursuit of restorative boredom, loin-girding for following them north on Sunday or Monday, staying there I guess until Tuesday so we can all come home and be tired going into the shortened school week and the arrival of June with all of its what’s-that-black-dot-on-the-ceiling little jumpy spiders and emergent Northeastern humidity.

The dog needs a bath. The kid needs one more. I could use one myself. We’ve been extra-extra-broke this just-ended semester, and today’s payday, so Costco’s in the offing and maybe Job Lot if we can keep it together long enough to hit two stores. Big if.

As implied above, I’ve got stuff slated for Monday and Tuesday despite the long weekend here. There’s news to catch up on from being in the Quarterly Review, and premieres and all that throughout the week, regardless of my travel situation. Fuck I hope I get to go to that festival, but — and I know this won’t surprise you if you’ve ever spent more than five minutes on this site — I’m not optimistic about my chances.

Whatever you’re up to (or not), I hope you have a great and safe weekend. Watch your head, be safe, all that stuff. And thank you for reading, as always.

FRM.

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Canadian auteur Devin Townsend released Accelerated Evolution, the first of only two albums from the short-lived era of The Devin Townsend Band, in March 2003, one month after his more extreme metal outfit, the riotous Strapping Young Lad, issued their own SYL. Divided in purpose like light and dark — something that Townsend may or may not explore on his upcoming companion album releases Lightwork (Oct. 28 release date) and Nightwork; dude puts out more music than even his own label can keep up with, let alone the rest of humanity — Accelerated Evolution prioritized melody and songcraft, and put to accessible use the wash of prog-leaning metal that typified earlier solo efforts like 1997’s Ocean Machine: Biomech, 1998’s Infinity and the somewhat meaner 2000 outing, Physicist. Despite the change in band situation — as in, he put together a band that wasn’t Strapping Young Lad — the lushness that unifies Accelerated Evolution‘s “Storm,” “Random Analysis,” “Deadhead,” “Away” and “Sunday Afternoon” (and while we’re at it also the rest) wasn’t unprecedented, continuing a thread from 2001’s Terria that still plays heavily into his work today, as demonstrated on 2019’s let’s-just-go-orchestral-and-see-what-happens Empath.

So, different from Strapping Young Lad and purposefully so, but that was consistent with Townsend‘s prior solo output. And the two outfits, through SYL‘s brilliant 2005 album, Alien, and The Devin Townsend Band‘s one-upping-by-being-even-more-brilliant Synchestra (discussed here), would eventually enter conversation, collide, and create something new in The Devin Townsend Project after SYL‘s 2006 swansong, The New Black, but for being in its particular spot in Devin Townsend‘s ongoing creative progression, for its clarity of intention to engage its audience with songcraft, for pulling away from some of the experiments in sound collage, etc., of his earlier solo records, and for the band, Accelerated Evolution could only be called prog, but its identity within that was and remains almost impossibly rich. It is the product of about three different creative transitions happening at the same time for its maker, and yet it is cohesive, massive, encompassing and vital.

Townsend‘s work has been sprinkled with enough hyperbole for the last 20-plus years that I don’t necessarily feel compelled to add to it, but he’s someone who has well earned the loyalty of his fans even as he’s delved into various indulgences and experiments — anyone remember Devlab? The Hummer? — and though I’ve come and gone following along his sometimes-merry-sometimes-tearjerking-sometimes-fun-sometimes-just-weird adventures in sound, Accelerated Evolution has remained a special point in the timeline. Not really appropriate to say “lightning in a bottle,” since Townsend could probably make 100 records like this if he wanted to, just build them up one layer of guitar at a time until he gets to an immersive shove like “Suicide” here or the made-to-move “Traveller” and concluding hookmeister “Slow Me Down,” but still. A creative moment that is fortunately preserved through the clear vision of his own production. It is beautiful where Strapping Young Lad often strove to be ugly, and Townsend‘s vocal ability to convey emotion in “Sunday Afternoon” manages to not at all contradict the rush of scream-laced opener “Depth Charge,” but instead to feed into the whole-album affect that holds firm throughout the 54-minute run.

What the fuck am I talking about? I love this record, is what I’m trying to say. Yeah, it’s probably as close as Devin Townsend has ever come to writing a pop version of his take on heavy prog metal, but I’d have a hard time directing you to an album that does a better job of speaking to its audience while serving its own creative ends. The languid roll of “Deadhead” after the shove of “Random Analysis” — which, yes, has the lines, “Still you’re saying ‘fa-ot is as fa-ot does with every little fa-ot thing a fa-ot do’/I’m not insane, I’m not insane, I’m just smarter than you”; a word choice that one assumes Townsend, who turned 50 in May, probably regrets even using in a quoted context — the sheer brazenness of making “Suicide” the centerpiece, and the fluidity with which Accelerated Evolution crosses lines between metal and not-metal in a song like “Traveller” working its way up to its screams, or how “Random Analysis” and “Deadhead” sets up the pattern for “Traveller” and the spacious guitar musing “Away” is nothing short of genius, and if you search through this site for how many times I’ve thrown that word around, you’ll see it’s few compared to how much music has been discussed in the last 13-plus years. This album is simply craft at another level.

I don’t want to sit here and try to mansplain Devin Townsend to you, what he’s accomplished in his career, whether it’s with Strapping Young Lad, Devin Townsend Band, Devin Townsend Project, Ziltoid, getting his start as a teenager with Steve Vai, all of that stuff. I just love these songs, and I’ve been a fan long enough that I don’t feel the need to feign impartiality and not say so. If you’ve never been interested in Townsend‘s output, or perhaps been put off by the eternal question of where to start or how to approach a catalog that encompasses multiple incarnations of the guy himself — I remember when The Devin Townsend Project started, thinking it lacked the moniker charm of The Devin Townsend Band, even if it had the added layer of humor thinking of himself as the project in question — it’s okay. I have come and gone over the years too, but sometimes you get on a kick and I’ve been rediscovering my affection for his work. This one stood out to me. If you’ve never listened to him before or given it a real shot, maybe Accelerated Evolution can be an entry point.

If nothing else, every time I put on “Sunday Afternoon,” I feel like my day gets a little bit better. Maybe you can too.

And like I mentioned above, Townsend‘s discography is ever-growing. The last couple years have been full of quarantine concerts, special editions — last December he released two records, The Puzzle and Snuggles, that I didn’t even know about until I started writing this — so there’s a universe to dig into. But especially if you’re new, start with this, keep it casual, and see where you end up.

As always, and maybe a little more than usual, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

“Good morning daddy,” from upstairs. 5:27AM wakeup.

That’s The Pecan, who’s been waking up exceedingly early these last few weeks. Now sitting next to me, I wonder if he reads these words yet. Probably. My dude is scary intelligent and somewhat covert about skills development until all of a sudden he starts reading street signs and shit.

We had a rough week.

It culminated yesterday in a phone call at 9:24AM telling us to pick him up from camp, that he was no longer welcome. He’d been hitting, biting, kicking, having a hard time generally, and still doesn’t use the toilet, which was a requirement. Camp had a policy no money back. We got our money back. I’m rather proud of the email The Patient Mrs. and I wrote to the owner of the camp, and of the fact that I told the director of The Pecan’s section off directly and called his camp inadequate to my son’s needs, which apparently it was.

That was a shitty situation pretty much from day one, but I’d been hoping it would smooth out rather than take the turn it took, not the least because that was our plan for the summer. He’d be at camp. The writing days were easy, he was swimming every day, it seemed pretty perfect. Alas. Daddy Daycamp it is.

This invariably makes next week’s continuation of the Quarterly Review more complicated. I also have a Creem column due — they pay me! it’s been long enough that that’s a novelty — and PostWax liner notes revisions for Acid King. Complicated. See also “5:27AM wakeup” above. Used to be my man slept reliably until after six.

So camp’s out. We’re exploring other options, like having someone come and just hang out with him for a couple hours a day, go for walks and bike rides, maybe take him to the kiddie pool up the hill at the town pool if we decide to join or just make sure he doesn’t lack-of-impulse-control his way into playing in traffic while dancing in and drinking hose water, etc. I like that notion because it’s one-on-one, and that’s how he’s best, and it’s centered around the home, where I can still be available if needed for backup while I’m otherwise working on this site, but finding the right person is probably a longer-term project than this weekend. I worry about him being lonely. Even his cousins, who he loves, are older, and every time he’s in a setting with another kid there’s an issue. We’ve read 1-2-3 Magic and a host of others. If there was a magic bullet answer for this kid, I feel like we would at least have had a hint of it. As of now, the only way he listens to me, ever, is if I threaten to take some preferred activity or item, toy, etc., away. I don’t like being that person. I don’t like myself as that person.

Collectively, we feel awful. Him, her, me. The whole family. My mother came to the house yesterday afternoon, kind of just for moral support, and fell outside on our patio. Nothing broken, thankfully, but it was another kick that, the giant shit The Pecan took after bedtime — “Daddy… I have to poop…” from the top of the stairs as I was about to start watching the new Star Trek — was a fitting end to a day. Shit up the kid’s back, in his shirt. We’re talking about “diapers going away” starting tomorrow. I don’t know if I’m brave enough to pull the trigger on that and invite that kind of existential pain. Parenthood as a relative measurement of agonies.

He’s up and running and I need to get him breakfast (6:09AM, if you’re wondering), so I’m gonna punch out. Great and safe weekend. Hydrate, watch your head. No non-consensual biting. Gimme show next week.

FRM.

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I won’t attempt to even feign impartiality here: I love this album. By now, the Devin Townsend discography is — for the uninitiated — an impenetrable hodgepodge of various releases from different incarnations of the man himself and bands built around him, from Strapping Young Lad to The Devin Townsend Band to The Devin Townsend Project to… wait for it… Devin Townsend, and that’s before you get into whether Ocean Machine: Biomech was supposed to be a record by a band called Ocean Machine, or an offshoot project like Casualties of Cool or that thing he did with Jason Newsted that time, or that thing he did with Scott Reeder that time, or his book, or Ziltoid the Omniscient, and so on and so forth.

Synchestra was released in 2006 and is a crossroads album. It ties together with Strapping Young Lad‘s penultimate, likewise brilliant 2005 LP, Alien, in theme and musical callbacks, a cut like “Babysong” coming in answer to “Love?” from the SYL release, and pre-hidden-track Synchestra closer “Notes From Africa” actually reworking a part of that  song into its own multifaceted progression. This was Townsend, an artist of rare expressive and compositional capability whose career began at 19 with Steve Vai, working through the idea of procreation and coming up with a lush and genius prog metal modus in the process. “Triumph” talks about “Hooray for Dr. Young” and “Hooray the time has come to vanish once again,” and Synchestra was the final album from The Devin Townsend Band before Townsend went to ground and did the Hummer drone record and broke out the puppet for Ziltoid, then came back with The Devin Townsend Project for Ki and a succession of albums the last of which was 2016’s Transcendence — so you see where the idea of ‘crossroads’ comes from. It’s also fair to consider Synchestra a signal of intent in bringing Strapping Young Lad to a close, as that band’s last album, The New Black, was also released in 2006 but cobbled together from various odds and ends in, if I remember right, contractual obligation to produce one more record.

And if you’re still reading and your eyes haven’t glazed over, well, thanks. You also see where ‘impenetrable’ comes from. It’s a sometimes manic level of creativity.

Whatever came before or would follow after, Synchestra was a special moment put to tape. At 65 minutes, it was the realization of the vision of prog Townsend had been developing all along on records like Infinity (1998), Physicist (2000), the also-essential Terria (2001) and the first Devin Townsend Band LP, Accelerated Evolution, in 2003. Its songs run a gamut from the folkish and beautiful intro “Let it Roll” to the goofy metal parody “Vampira” — to say nothing of its lead-in “Vampolka” — kind of making fun of goth and Strapping Young Lad at the same time, while also being ridiculously catchy and over the top, to masterpieces like the building “Triumph” early on, and “Gaia,” the largely instrumental “A Simple Lullaby” and the uberwerk that is “Pixillate,” arriving as it does as part of a movement in the second half of the album that begins with the suitably bright ambient piece “Mental Tan” and unfolds across the remaining tracks plus the bonus let’s-just-have-a-good-time classic-style rocker “Sunshine and Happiness” with the real culmination in the prior “Notes From Africa.”

That second movement, of course, follows on from the first, which ties together more as individual songs than one whole piece but flows nonetheless, with “Let it Roll” moving into the chaotic “Hypergeek” and “Triumph” and “Babysong” feeding into “Vampolka” and “Vampira,” making for an initial 22 minutes that might leave one spinning but ultimately proves just crazy enough to work, in no small part because of Townsend‘s mastery as a songwriter, performer and producer. He’s not alone here — Steve Vai guests on guitar in “Triumph,” Ryan Van Poederooyen plays drums, Mike Young adds bass and tuba, Dave Young plays keys of various sorts, and there are guest vocals throughout — but there is a personal feel nonetheless in part because of the conversational, fourth-wall-breaking framing of the lyrics, and in part because the style and substance, lush as they are and cleanly, clearly produced in a way that has become a Townsend hallmark, are so much his own. As the tracklisting shifts into “Mental Tan,” “Gaia,” “Pixillate” and its stomping, soulful follow-up “Judgement,” there’s a grandeur that justifies the orchestral reference in the record’s title, the crowd sounds of the mostly-instrumental “A Simply Lullaby” feeding into the denouement of “Sunset” and the sense of arrival in “Notes From Africa,” as structure becomes no less of a plaything than melody when it comes to the broader vision of Synchestra as a whole.

And I won’t take away from that, because the album is visionary. It’s of a scope that turns most metal into dust and shows progressive rock/metal for the posturing crank it is. But I need to talk about “Pixillate” for a second because it’s just too gorgeous to go unremarked. The way the first minute builds up with that chug and the far back vocals, the voice of Gaia up front with Townsend answering back, like dialogue, the verse and chorus together, all the while this underlying motion plays out carrying the listener across an eight-minute span that’s an album’s worth of journey — it’s just incredible. It deserves every bit of volume you can give it, and if you’re at all in a position to close your eyes, tilt your head back and let it wash over you, do. Your life will be richer for it. This record is 15 years old this year and “Pixillate” still raises the laughably tiny amount hair on my arms every time. Every time.

And 15 years later, I still find something new to hear on the record. That’s cliché as fuck, but it’s true too. Even if it wasn’t though, like I said at the outset, it comes down to the basic fact that I love this album. I have associations with it positive and negative, but that’s life isn’t it? And Synchestra is an album to live with. If anyone — one person — who reads this who hasn’t heard it hears it, it’s worth it. A word to the wise though, the YouTube playlist above has volume changes that are a pain in the ass. It was the best stream I could find, but you may want to search it out otherwise.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Maybe a little more than usual, I hope you enjoy this one. Thanks for reading.

—

So I guess the big news this week was Bongzilla signing to Heavy Psych Sounds. Oh, and America’s new president. There was that too. Whatever. Looking forward to that Bongzilla LP, curious if HPS will pick up Church of Misery as well after releasing Sonic Flower stuff. That’d be something.

The real news was The Pecan was back in school this week. In-person. Made a big quality-of-life difference around here, I think most of all for him. He needs that out-of-the-house experience that has been so lagging for last year. Hey, a year. It’s been a year. Covid-era, indeed.

But things are things. I’m glad politics are bland again. I hope they continue to be so and I hope Democrats realize unity is a joke, blow away the filibuster and actually do something in the next two years before they lose their majority in congress and the slide toward right wing fascism picks up where it left off. That’s my hot take. Feel the burn.

I need to have a tooth removed. Number 30, if you’re interested. Apparently I have a massive infection in my jawline. Oops. I consult with a surgeon on Monday. Stay tuned.

Speaking of tuned — masterful segue! — there’s a new The Obelisk Show on Gimme Metal today at 5pm. I don’t talk, so there’s nothing to interrupt the flow except Gimme promos, which give it that real-radio feel. At least I don’t have to listen to myself speak.

You should really listen to the Devin Townsend record.

Great and safe weekend. Hydrate, mask up, thanks for reading.

FRM.

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