“Running on Feel”
Evolution has Listenability
THE DEVIN TOWNSEND BAND
Accelerated Evolution
Inside Out
**** 4/5
I guess this is what they mean when they call someone a “tortured soul.“
For a lot of people, the name Devin Townsend might conjure up echoes of STRAPPING YOUNG LAD-esque double bass, Steve Vai power riffs or contorted-faced screaming. And those associations would all be warranted. But there’s a duality to his music that often gets overlooked, a huge gap between what he is in STRAPPING YOUNG LAD (an admitted side-project to him, an “outlet to freak out”), as opposed to how he submerges himself in ambient atmospherics in certain solo releases, like Devlab. But in the middle somewhere, between the over-subtlety of his quiet works and the “freak out” of his loud ones, is THE DEVIN TOWNSEND BAND, and albums like 2003’s Accelerated Evolution.
It’s exactly these multiple sides and shifting sensibilities of his that make an album like Accelerated Evolution so interesting. For the most part not a “proggy” record, it stays pretty structured. No crazy time shifts, no 15min epics. It’s diverse and layered, but it’s mainly a mood piece, a journey through the lows and highs of pain and memory, juxtaposing angry growling “Suffers!” lost in waves of power chords and noise, next to soft and pretty “I want to put my faith in you, babes,” where the vocals are a pivotal part of the melody, in line with it, not set against it in discord.
Although I’d probably have to argue that a few of his earlier releases, Terria and Ocean Machine, are “better” records, weightier and more impressive—Accelerated Evolution has a quality about it that almost makes it easier to listen to. Maybe it’s because it is more straight-forward and accessible—but the piece has got listenability, the potential to be a fall-back record whenever you’re feeling hard rock but not sure what to put in for a spin.
To say it’s smooth, though, is not at all to imply that its message is simple or its affect ordinary. The way the piece effortlessly combines complex musicianship with traditional song structures, anger and calm, a scream with a piercing but refined guitar solo, illustrates an impossible-to-articulate state of conflict, of constant ups and down, like the inside of a tragedy where you sift through the different parts of yourself and try to put them back together again. There are tracks like “Storm,” or the perfect “Deadhead,” that play like an emotional struggle out from the bottom of something awful, scraping at the ceiling and just making out rays of sun above you–or sometimes not.
“I’m starting to feel OK,” Townsend writes. “But I’m wasted / And I’m failing / Oh, Tracy, please / Can’t you see? / It’s just me.”
The way his vocals grow higher and higher and progressively more strained in tracks like these feel like he’s fighting to break away from himself. Just listen to “Deadhead,” how it builds onto itself like a growing impatience, Townsend’s emotion-soaked vocals growing thinner and thinner until it feels as though his words might break just before it all finally releases, but without any real tonal relief. That says it all.
This is a piece about struggle, about being stuck in your head, feeling like you’re floating when all you want is to be grounded again. It’s about feeling powerless and angry—but savoring the flashes of peace, and even being hopeful. Townsend’s mastery of song structure, of building and releasing, is what drives the journey and makes it real. It may even catch you off guard, bring you back to a place you may have been before, to days spent listening to music to lose yourself—either in noise or past feelings.
Accelerated Evolution is a perfect middle-ground for Townsend, where he not only gives each of his many conflicting emotions an equal amount of play, but also never tries to compete with or overpower them. “I’m going to be so fucking sensitive but so intense,” he told Lollipop Magazine, “and be unafraid to be either.” And so joy turns to sorrow, turns to anger:
“Now the rain it comes, the rain it blurs the grey line
The grey line, the Greyhound home
…So give in to the heat of the moment
Give in to the pain”
This is what adult angst sounds like.
This entry was posted on Sunday, May 3rd, 2009 at 12:01 am and is filed under cd reviews, music. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.
