Devin the Dude

I think it’s interesting how there are people in the world of music that will float just beneath your radar for many years and then suddenly pop up to the surface and finally grab your attention. My latest addition to this club is a Canadian metal guy named Devin Townsend.

I know that me talking about metal is like me talking about myself, which is to say that I do it all the time and most of you don’t care for it, but I think this guy is fascinating.

As I have mentioned before, I work in a bookstore. Being in this profession means that I have a lot of access to magazines, and in this case, metal magazines.

The names of these magazines are usual pretty stupid. There’s Canada’s Big Words and Bloody Knuckles, which while being undeniably poorly named is also a pretty good rag once the dust settles. There’s the Brit mag, Kerrang, which is okay, I guess, and has perhaps been around a little too long. And then there is the cream of the crop. Decibel, from Philadelphia, America’s ad-hoc home of all things metal. For me, Decibel is the king of all metal mags. The writing tends to be fairly strong, they cover many genres within the metal world, they know their history, and they always seem to have a good idea of what good new stuff is cropping up before anyone else does.

With my limited attention span and the unending mountain of material out there, there is just no way to be aware of it all. Sometimes you simply have to make judgment calls.

The flipside of this tactic is that occasionally you run the risk of prematurely turning off something that might be an axiomatic event in your appreciation of the world around you.

My digression aside, as I have read god knows how many metal mags over the years, Devin Townsend was always one of those guys on the periphery of my awareness. He is so amazingly ugly that his looks alone put me off for years. Townsend is known for wearing a hairstyle that has come to be known as a “skullet.” Basically it means that Townsend is almost completely bald on the top of his head, while in the back he has gone ahead and grown out his remaining hair into dreadlocks. Terrifying. Add to that his soul patch and Mr. Peabody glasses and you have one ugly dude.

For years all I knew about Townsend was that he was insanely ugly, the frontman for a band called Strapping Young Lad, and that he was British.

It turns out that on the third count, I was wrong. The guy is from Vancouver.

Score one for Mr. Dumbass.

I made one of those hasty decisions to ignore SYL and moved on.

Too bad, because Devin Townsend is a pretty interesting guy, in fact, in the world of metal, he is an all too rare commodity: not only is he talented as hell, he is also smart, funny, and brutally self-aware. He’s also bi-polar, which must play hell on touring life, and probably goes a long way towards explaining his current leave of absence from public life.

Townsend first made a name for himself when he was plucked from his first band and named as the singer for Steve Vai’s band. This helps explain the frequent Frank Zappa influence in much of Townsend’s output.

Once on his own, Townsend embarked on a seemingly endless number of projects, always with himself at the center. The most celebrated venture being the band, Strapping Young Lad.

SYL is a brutally heavy band. Townsend is a master at plundering elements from many facets of extreme metal and using them to create something slightly unique in each incarnation. There are elements of death, thrash, grindcore, metalcore, black metal, the new wave of British heavy metal, cyber metal (sort of like Voivod when they were bearable), and a laundry list of damn near everything else.

The guy is near virtuosic on the guitar, but is also an amazing drummer, bassist, keyboardist, and vocalist. Plus, he has a great ear for engineering and production. His records are thick, clear, and well separated tonally, and no matter how harsh, very thoughtfully put together.

Best of all, the guy is funny. Nothing he does is to be taken too seriously, and in metal, that is a gift.

Listeners of the podcast may remember hearing the SYL track on last week’s cast, and also may remember hearing a track from his one-off one man show, Ziltoid the Omniscient.

Ziltoid is basically a rock opera about an alien who has decided to invade and destroy earth in the process of finding the universe’s greatest cup of coffee.

The Unspeakable kept telling me about this Devin Townsend guy behind the Ziltoid album, but it took my slow brain months to realize that he was the same hideous guy behind SYL.

Eventually Townsend worked his way into my head, and as I write this today, I am a convert.

And the coup de grace? SYL does a cover of the song Room 429 from the New York band Cop Shoot Cop. And even more surprising, I find the SYL version the better of the two. And coming from me, a huge Cop Shoot Cop fan, that is saying a lot. SYL trades in the brash confrontation of CSC and replaces it with loads of muscle and attitude. The build up at the end of the bridge is one of those hair-raising moments for me every time. I get all goofy whenever the song gets there. Metal guys can ruin anything, just look at the Metallica cover record. They butcher damn near everything they touch on that record. Devin Townsend takes a song no one would expect him to, let alone recognize for that matter, and completely makes it his own.

It’s learning about stuff like all this that makes music so thrilling for me year after year. Take a few minutes and look into this guy. You may not dig his music, but he is at the very least an interesting character, and maybe you might even get into him just like I have.

Carry on.