Just a little over seventy-two hours ago, I only had a vague awareness of Devin Townsend’s existence. I still pay some attention to goings-on in the world of heavy music, even though, truth be told, I don’t find a lot of it appealing anymore. What can I say? I’m not a young man filled with excess testosterone, and my emotional palette contains more than aggression and depression, so a lot of today’s metal music just strikes me as too limited and boring. Somehow, over the years, I had gotten the impression that Townsend was an avant-garde, abrasive, noise-metal musician. You know, buzzsaw guitars, Cookie Monster vocals, etc. Well, I was very wrong, and I curse whoever misled me. He does have a lot of heavy songs, with galloping-herds-of-Brontosaurus kick-drums, 32nd-note riffs, and detuned guitars (he apparently tunes down to C and even B, which is also what Type O Negative used to get their massive, moaning-glaciers, tectonic-plates-shifting, footsteps-of-God sound), and he’s perfectly capable of shrieking and growling when he wants. But he also has some ethereal acoustic music, and he names Enya’s Watermark album as one of his Top 5 all-time biggest influences. This dude is seriously diverse.
The Lady of the House has had classical training as a singer, and so we’ve been enjoying the YouTube channel of a Scottish vocal coach, Beth Roars, and that’s where I first heard him, performing his song “Kingdom.” The way his spectacular voice climbs and soars from about 6:45 to 6:50 in that video gives me full-body chills every time. From there, well, he’s been recording since the early ’90s, and he’s quite prolific, so there’s a huge back catalog for me to dive into. I’m still only about half-done. Some of his songs, like “Namaste” or “Addicted,” sound like a slightly more melodic Ministry or Godflesh, with an aggro, industrial feel to them. Other songs, like the acoustic “Little Pig,” are more reminiscent of Pink Floyd. (And that song comes from a gorgeous collection of B-sides! Most bands should be so lucky to put out a proper album as good as that, and these are just the songs he had left over!) Some albums are more of a mix of heavy and gentle. His latest release, Empath, which came out this spring, is one where he says he tried, for the first time, to put all of himself into it, rather than compartmentalizing his different tastes into different projects (he’s recorded under Devin Townsend, The Devin Townsend Project, The Devin Townsend Band, and Strapping Young Lad, and probably others I haven’t uncovered yet). The closest comparison I can make is to Billy Corgan of Smashing Pumpkins, who is similarly capable of writing blistering metal riffs as well as feather-light, wispy melodies, similarly prolific, and who also physically resembles a giant thumb. But Corgan’s voice is much more limited (and definitely an acquired taste), and I personally have found much of his post-Smashing Pumpkins output to be forgettable and uninspired. No, Townsend appears to me to be sui generis. I wouldn’t have believed it possible to discover someone like him.
As any middle-aged or older person knows, it’s increasingly difficult to be surprised. History’s weight bears down hard on us; memory stifles imagination. Newer music tends to sound like things we’ve already heard done before (and done better). Older artists tend to be inconsistent quality-wise over a long career. So you can imagine what a total joy it is for me to stumble across a treasure like this. Dozens and dozens of songs to listen to! Genuinely fresh sounds, unlike any other artist I can think of! It’s disorienting, but in a good way. For a couple weeks or so, the whole world will feel almost new again. Every morning, I’ll eagerly look forward to listening again. There will be that delicious unfamiliarity with the songs for a while, where I remember enough of the melody to crave it without being able to remember exactly what’s coming next in the song. I’ll run some songs into the ground, listening on repeat day after day, until several days later, when I move to the next one in the playlist and joyfully realize that I’d already forgotten I bought this one, and I’ll get to fall in love with it again! I’ve been listening to music all day long throughout this weekend, and when I’m not, my head is heavy with melodies, some of which, being only half-remembered, morph into something unique, making me want to grab my own guitar and try to capture them before they drift away. Ah, but it’s so blissful to just stay put and let them ebb and flow over me…
And as it happens, this coincides with the new fitness routines I’m building. We joined a gym at the beginning of summer, where we started working with a personal trainer and a nutritionist. Like always when you change old habits, there’s a novelty to the new way of doing things that focuses your attention and makes a lot of details of everyday life stand out. Plus, we’re at that point in August where it’s still hot out, of course, but there’s a hint of fall coming soon. I’ve come to appreciate August, funny enough. I feel almost magnanimous toward it, as you can afford to feel toward a defeated opponent. “Well, summer, you did your best to kill me, but you’re getting weaker, and you’ll be gone soon. Thanks for putting up a challenging fight. See you next year.”
So, as I’m sure we’ve all experienced many times, there’s this fortuitous constellation of events and feelings that make certain time periods preserve especially well in the memory. I’m old enough now that I can somewhat recognize them as they’re forming, and it’s wonderful to think ahead to next year, when all of these particular details will look as if they’ve been caught in amber. Especially the songs. There’s not much sweeter than a song that calls to mind a specific time and place. Some melodies will go with you anywhere, like carry-on luggage, and will adapt to new circumstances. Some stay rooted to the place where they were born for you. Music that evokes the borderland between summer and fall might be my favorite of all.
A small part of me wonders anxiously how many more serendipitous discoveries like this there are for me to make, or how infrequent they’re likely to be. The wiser part of me just laughs at how quickly we become greedy for more! more! before we’ve even finished what’s in front of us. Who could be so ungrateful to demand to know if and when it will be repeated? It’s wonderful enough that it happened at all. This is exactly where I was always trying to get to. Let time continue on without me for just a little while.
August 11, 2019 @ 7:44 pm
Hey man, long time. Good to see the DT praise, he seems to be one of the music world’s better-kept secrets. I don’t know if it’s because there’s just too much out there to choose from, or “rock is dead,” or whatever. But yeah, he does everything from dance music to death metal, and at a pretty high level. Strapping Young Lad is good stuff, especially the City album, but much more in that “extreme metal” wheelhouse. Check out the 2006 Download Festival set on YouTube, with Gene Hoglan on drums, and DT rocking the skullet. Amazing stuff, and not for the faint of heart.
Here’s the highest praise I can give a musician, if you’ll indulge a brief story: I work in IT these days, just me and another guy in a rather isolated 2nd-floor office. All clients are helpdesk, email, or phone, so we can play whatever music we want, and we both like heavy stuff mostly. We have access to each other’s computers, in case one of us is out and there’s an emergency, so when we bring in new music, we just put it in the D: drive on our respective machine, and poach from each other at will.
Anyway, I brought in a bunch of DT recently, nine or ten albums’ worth, didn’t say anything, didn’t talk it up, hadn’t even had a chance to play any of it. And he finds it, copies it over to his own hard drive, and starts playing nothing but DT for about a week, asking a bunch of questions about how different each album sounded, all that. It reinforced the old cliche that the music really does speak for itself when it’s that good and innovative and different.
I still say that the two best rock albums from the previous decade are Clutch’s Blast Tyrant and DT’s Synchestra. YMMV, of course. Opeth’s Sorceress is also a great release of more recent vintage, recapturing all the cool things about ’70s prog.
You’re right about how age reminds us that we have fewer of those precious wide-eyed discoveries ahead of us, so we should treasure them all the more when they occur.
August 12, 2019 @ 6:18 am
Heywood, you old dinosaur! Good to see you still lumbering around! I’m honored that you’ve bothered to keep up with me as I bounced between URLs.
Yeah, I can’t remember where I got that misleading impression of him. I should have known better, too, because I just remembered that two years ago he was touring with Clutch and the Obsessed (two long-time favorites), and they came as close as Richmond a few days after Christmas (it’s surprising how many bands completely skip Virginia altogether. Is there some embargo I don’t know about?) I ended up deciding not to go see that show, but a time-traveling me would jump on it now with both feet. (To be fair, I’m sure an abbreviated set of his wouldn’t have been very representative of his catalog.)
He reminds me that I have nothing against heavy music when it’s done well; I’ve just gotten discouraged by how derivative so much of it has become (Sturgeon’s Law gets ever more true as we age). Some of his riffs remind me of King’s X in their expressive melody; some sugary choruses are reminiscent of the Wildhearts. (I’m pretty sure Ginger Wildheart is a friend/collaborator of his, too — my God! Why didn’t I pick up on all these hints the universe was clearly trying to give me?) Ten or so years ago, electronic music was where I found more interesting nuance in the songs and sounds when metal bands were still milking every last drop of Pantera’s influence; maybe I’ll turn back toward guitar-oriented music and see what I’ve missed since then. I’ve already noticed that YouTube’s algorithms are trying to line up Opeth for me, so perhaps I’ll take the hint this time.
You might enjoy the work of a German artist, Joachim Witt. He’s also a bit of a chameleon, having veered from pop to electronica to metal, but since about the late ’90s, he’s settled in mostly at the heavier end of the spectrum. His Bayreuth trilogy, especially the second and third records, is where I first got into him. The German vocals with guitar riffs will almost certainly remind American listeners of Rammstein at first, but I think he’s a lot more innovative and interesting. Check out especially the second and third Bayreuth records, Dom, Ich, Neumond, Thron, and Rubezahl. His vocals have what I think of as a particularly European, almost operatic style sometimes, which I really appreciate. (Peter Steele of Type O had a similar powerful way of enunciating and projecting his voice.)
Thanks for stopping by! Don’t be a stranger.