Strapping Young Lad - Alien

I was introduced to Strapping Young Lad when I was in sixth form. Angela Gossow-era Arch Enemy were touring the UK and SYL were main support, so my friend Gavin sent me some tracks of theirs over MSN Messenger (those were the days, eh?) and within seconds I was like - "errrr...fuck this Arch Enemy shite". The first track I was sent was "Shitstorm", track 3 off this intense, industrial, almost symphonic death metal beast (I'm just stringing words togethers as genres these days and hope that it works), and I was instantly hooked on the chaos.

Devin Townsend is nothing short of a music genius, but lets not forget that the man was once a complete mess. Mix those two things together and the outcome is worryingly brutal; I genuinely fear the twisted mind who decided "Skeksis" was a good idea for a song. Gene Hoglan's drum performance on this record is nothing short of pummelling - nonstop as if Agoraphobic Nosebleed sampled Fear Factory's drum sounds. If I had to say one thing bad about this record is that the whole thing is a bit over-compressed, but even that kinda works with the wall-of-sound style of production that is going on.

Devin and pals are now onto pastures far more progressive and calmer, but this will always be one of my absolute favourites from that ever-revolving canon of musicians. There's so much more to this record than the "Love?" single; this is a tangled, schizophrenic, digital web of distilled hyper-speed industrial metal (kinda like Meshuggah on intra-muscular steroids and bath salts). 

Devin Townsend - Ziltoid The Omniscient

For me, the blow of Strapping Young Lad's dissolution was softened somewhat with the release of this album shortly afterward. The recent release of Z2 (the sequel to this record for those catching up) reminded me that I haven't written a little bit about the original Ziltoid, which is a modern metal classic, in my opinion. If you've not heard of Ziltoid The Omniscient I suspect you may have been living under some sort of metal-resistant rock. Ziltoid is an intergalactic overlord of Ziltoidia, who invades earth under the premise of tasting our universe's finest cup of coffee. His story is told through the medium of Devin Townsend's meandering, almost operatic in scale heavy metal madness.

I feel that this stands apart from the rest of Devin's solo work as it incorporates a lot of straight-up metal songwriting, although his signature stamp is easily detected. It basically first comes across as a slightly-scaled-back-in-intensity SYL, unlike his previous solo work which has always been sprawling and atmospheric in scope. There is also the comedic factor to consider; something which has always been a part of Mr. Townsend's work, but this also reaches wacky new heights on this album, with plot devices such as The Planet Smasher, Captain Fantastic, Ziltoid himself (who is so omniscient, if there were to be two omnisciences, he would be both), and the twist at the end of his metal epic revealing that it's all the daydream of a kid working in a Starbucks or something. Can you ruin the ending to a concept album? Looks like I just did.

All in all if you don't take your metal too seriously and perhaps contradictorily also love searingly precise instrumentation and extremely well-crafted song writing, you need to check this out, if you haven't already.