Author: Sandi Sadar Šoba
Artist: Strapping Young Lad
Label: Century Media
Release: 2005
Length: 54:45
Rating: 4.5/5
To create something worthwhile and conceptually lasting, you always need a pinch of talent, genius, luck, or else you simply need to have the balls and dare to push the limits of what’s allowed. The Canadian enfant terrible, a man who on top of a fruitful producing career grabbed the mic and totally bluffed his way into working with Steve Vai, then outdid all the competition with the guitar extremism of metal’s most perfect extremes in Strapping Young Lad, and who is now pouring a completely different, solo and delicately spiced kind of music into your ears, the potent Mr. Devin Gerret Townsend, has tasted and done all of the above!
Townsend’s brainchild of the first half of the new millennium is undoubtedly Strapping Young Lad, a name revered in metal circles both for a dazzling run of discographic peaks and for its stage authenticity, manic unpredictability and bizarre sense of humor. A dead-serious blast and a peculiar, successful mutant in the success story is also the fourth album, the record Alien. Zappa-esque production, which also takes cues from Phil Spector, builds a brutal wall of screaming sound, while the demented absence of any single center of consciousness fills every corner of your room, in under an hour, with projections of different sides of Townsend’s personality.
Alien is, after all, a perfect musical experiment with medication, or rather with the absence of it. For the sake of a total musical test, Devin gave up the meds that soothed his mental illness, his bipolar disorder. Though on first listen it may not offer a drastic step forward from the SYL record, Alien is special precisely in that sidestep. The constant is the total explosiveness of the melodic sequences, which morph into monstrous eruptions of near-black-metal alternative, so that through cathartic but rare moments of calm you can climb to the very peak of grasping perfect, cruel dynamics and movement. Alien is a combination of pure grind, death metal, alternatively saturated psychedelia and manic orchestration, and once again it’s easiest to sum up in one word: the soundtrack to the approaching end of the world! Comparisons to Fear Factory and Chimaira are only pale approximations, since Strapping Young Lad outdo nearly all the competition in the world in every aspect and conceptual limit of musical violence, which becomes clear after the very first track, the opening steel stampede of Imperial. A guttural beast borrows Townsend’s vocal cords, and a salvo of ominous return erupts from the speakers – “WE HAVE RETURNED / FOREVER’S INVENTION / THE TWO BECAME ONE / TILL WE COLLIDE / TWO WORLDS COLLIDE / TILL WE COLLIDE…OH… / Further…further…FURTHER!!! / NOW is the TIME we DELIVER!!! / …SING and BE HEARD! / NOW!!! by the PROPHECY of the fucking weak / that fucking wept… / WE SHALL BE HEARD!!!” Exceptional praise goes to the rhythmic backbone of the whole outfit, and all the credit can go to none other than former Death and Dark Angel member Gene Hoglan. The tornado of rhythm is spiced up by the brutal guitar of the central guitar duo of Jed Simon and mastermind Townsend, and in between there’s just enough room for the bass thunderer and former Fear Factory member Byron Stroud. The almost carnivalesque, playful Skeksis humorously toys with God’s creation and blasphemously declares its opposition to the melodious world through the disharmony of an utterly elusive consciousness “I control an awkward soul / And my lines / Are automatic, automatically drawn / Realizing a multiverse in just one thing / And then I’m automatic, automatically gone”. After the spiritual nihilism, the escalation of hate-fueled agony kicks in, in a phenomenal, technical epic of black metal avant-garde. Shitstorm sinks you deep into the septic tank of intestinal ballast, and beneath the hellish rage lies an abundance of exceptional music, with keyboards filling the sonic palette with demonic pastel colors. The heavens part in the album’s lead single, the track Love? It’s as if King’s X had been wired through the console of Azazel’s own central information computer! “LOVE: the paradox of needing / OH LOVE, / MAKE WAY FOR BREEDING / GIVE IT TO ME! GIVE IT TO ME! / FUCK YOU AND YOUR TALK OF LOVE! / I know what I stand for; I STAND FOR ME!!” Sounds arrogant, pissed off and totally in tune with Townsend’s persona? Absolutely, because SYL don’t fake the feel-good stuff for anyone, and there’s even less room for musical sweet-talk. As Townsend puts it in the lightning-fast Ride “IN EVERY RELATIONSHIP / THERE HAS TO BE COMPROMISE / AND EVERY ONE OF THEM HAS BAGGAGE… / I KNOW I HAVE MY ISSUES… / AND WE! KNOW! YOU! HAVE! YOURS!!!! / PUT IT IN GEAR MOTHERFUCKR!!!!! / For tonight…WE RIDE!!!!” and that very feeling washes over you right at the halfway point of listening to this avant-garde metal treat. The melodic moment of HC-flavored weakness is housed in the phenomenal and shocking cannonade of Possessions, which squeezes an obsession with Rob Zombie imagery out of your lungs, while bombastic riffs foam up against the cliffs of choir vocals and conjure up the feel of groove metal as only the prematurely departed Dimebag could weave it, if you insist on names. After the last echo of the final chorus comes a shock to the system: you’re served an honest-to-god sugar-coated acoustic ballad, Two Weeks, which piles up a small sea of sarcastically spat-on standard rock clichés, while Townsend nonchalantly wipes his ass with all the pop-ish crap, and does it in a perfect, not-in-the-least-painful way! The metamorphosis into a state of total darkness begins very soon, with the brutal take on Thalamus, which has the split personality of a brutal butcher and a Floyd-stoned vegetarian: “Close your eyes and believe / Believe that the garden is all that you need / Believe you must bow to your knees / Believe what you want to believe / …Just believe / I’M FREE!!! / …ALIVE!!! / I’m MASTER!!! / …AND COMMANDER!!! / …OF MY LIFE!!! / …OF MY FATE!!! / …OF MY FAITH / …IN US!!!” The gods have left and we’re on our own. There’s endless space, yet the listener is overcome by a feeling of confinement and claustrophobia. Zen pierces the colon and penetrates through the heart to the skull, so it can burst out of every orifice of the crown of your soul into the universe: “MUST REMEMBER TO KEEP BOTH FEET ON THE GROUND / EVERYTHING IN MY LIFE IS TURNING ROUND / Then… we’re the only ones / We’re GODS, not demons / ZEN”. Every word is wrung dry, and Townsend wraps up his state of pure explosion and expansion with an instrumental implosion, the static of the track Infodump. A track that fades out in the hum of amps, in feedback and in the crackling of a now-calmed spirit. That track is also the album’s only weak spot. It’s nothing but pointless filler. Or is it?
Madness has never been so brutally cute or so brilliantly put into musical words. The demons are banished into the mixing desk, and through it they press into the ears of you, the listeners, with a multi-ton press. The imprint of what you hear is unmistakable and, hand on heart, successful despite the brutality, and with its directness and honesty Alien stands as a splendid monolith in a music scene full of shallow and, above all, faked orgasms. Strapping Young Lad, their existential absence notwithstanding, left a mark with their stylistic diversity and their methodology of exceptional weirdness that will be hard for anyone to erase. With Alien, Townsend confirmed his reputation as the standard-bearer of the modern music elite, and the despot of chaos and a thousand personalities remains unsurpassed in his musical anarchism, no exaggeration, even today!
Line-up
Devin Townsend – keyboards, guitar, vocals, samples
Gene Hoglan – drums
Byron Stroud – bass
Jed Simon – guitar
Guest musicians:
• Dave Young – keyboards, vocals
Male choir: Chris Valagao, Rossy Living, Cam Krotche, Will Campagna, Shane Clark, Ross Gale, Christ Stanley, Will Cochrane, Ash Manning, Ross Empson, Mike Quigley, Billy Marquardt and Jeff Cook
Female choir: Laurielynn Bridger, Marnie Mains, Ani Kyd, Tammy “Tamz” Theis, Magdalena Bulak, Shay Ward, Steph Reid, Deborah Rodrigo-Tyzio, Michelle Madden, and Joanna Ussner
Children’s vocals: Dorian Glaude-Living, Damian Moore, Ethan Belcourt-Lowe and Jayden Gignac
Production
Devin Townsend
Tracklist
1. Imperial
2. Skeksis
3. Shitstorm
4. Love?
5. Shine
6. We Ride
7. Possessions
8. Two Weeks
9. Thalamus
10. Zen
11. Info Dump
