Monday December 15, 2003
“So how did you come up with CGCGBE?”
“I kept playing around with different tunings until I found one I could work with.”
There’s always been a sense of experimentation and difference with Devin Townsend. Whether the enfant terrible of metal ever intended that is unclear, but from the moment he stepped onstage as Steve Vai’s vocalist in 1993 and stole the audience’s attention from the virtuoso, he has always been one to watch. Besides possessing a quite astonishing set of vocal pipes, his guitar chops are none too shabby either and his self-produced albums have a unique voice of their own which, while being markedly different in soundscape, are irrefutably his.
Post-Vai, his first two solo albums came under the moniker Strapping Young Lad. Both savage thunderclaps of harsh, unrelenting industrial metal, they created a fierce loyalty in fans and an equally strong alternative to nu-metal, which was slowly gaining momentum at that time. The fact that SYL live were no less an onslaught demonstrated without question that Devin’s skills were not confined to the studio. The sonic offspring of Slayer’s Kerry King and Godflesh’s Justin Broadrick was for real.
The decision then to leave Strapping on a shelf and produce the altogether more gentle experience of “Ocean Machine” may have seemed strange at the time but the results were no less well received. Gone were the jagged riffs and in their place came an almost Floyd-ian sense of space, arpeggios, triads and suspended chords in this aural homage to the eternal seas.
Diagnosed with bi-polar disorder during the making of his next, and most personal album, “Infinity”, it’s easier to understand his ability to switch between the dark and the light side of the music he creates. Both are featured herein alongside the comic, the rock, and even the Zappa-esque amalgams of the two. While it’s arguably his best album, it also took a great strain to create and it was almost two years before “Physicist” arrived, a slab of Space Rock that was noticeable more by it not being mixed by Devin than anything else.
As a producer, Devin’s tendency is to go with whichever technique seems appropriate at the time for the album. He’s used acoustic and digital desks, bounced dozens of vocals across tracks on ADAT, used Cubase “for his sins”, and “cried a lot” in the process. The tears have paid off though and his last three albums have paid testament to his trial by buttons and faders. 2001’s “Terria” saw him revisit Infinity territory but with a much more relaxed attitude. The emotions inside the music were still there but the harsh flik-flak between moods was gone. Coming up to date, the simultaneous release of a new Strapping Young Lad opus with a more straightforward rock offering, “Accelerated Evolution”, have seen him starting to garner the recognition he deserves. In a musical world of derivative pop, bland skate rock and uninventive nu-metal, Devin is that rarest of things; an original thinker, and long may he continue to be so.
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