devin townsend c/d

that is a lovely ocean machine choice, would be mine but for that closing triptych (the final final track doesn't count)

i also get 'oooollliiivvveesss' regularly in my head, although terria as a whole is best experienced in one go

"funeral" >>>>>>>>>>>>>>>

It's also the perfect track to have on your headphones when on a cross trainer.

There's a peculiar production trick that DT employed a lot that I really love, tricks actually. He'll feed vocals (I think) through extremely long and smeary reverbs creating these wonderful, hazy sounding drone tracks that will often play out for the whole song, very cool, similarly there's often a lot of multitracked TV babble or vocal samples that seem to run in the background of some songs for their duration.

Not sure I could decide between Funeral and Bastard but yeah Hide Nowhere is great as well.

yeah he does some fun stuff with his production xp that makes everything he does sound like his own genre.

listening to 'the fluke' right now...like, fucking hell this is extraordinary music

he really does have his own kitchen-sink approach to pop-metal - it's kind of transcendent - has the zeal and brightness of a superchurch sermon but it's all on the side of good

def gonna be buying the live at royal albert hall blu ray when it comes out (soon)
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=I5_-Ky_bqgc
seems like a massive production. here he brings a ton of people and his kid on stage for the last triumphant finale.

ginger wildheart simply has his own northern-england-renegade echo of this ;)

xp

whoa, yeah. saw some of his live show on youtube - he writes unique ziltoid scripts tailored to the people of the uk! what a gent

his guitar tone is often so bodiless and so filled out by synths that there's this total airy and atmospheric quality to his stuff that's pretty singular. my college girlfriend got me into him and i just remember thinking i'd never heard anything seem simultaneously so calm and so constantly moving

kudos to my college girlfriend for being a total devy head and also being a generally awesome person

yeah it's kind of like shoegaze but more ecstatic, more skyborne - it is the light of beatification transmitted via the medium of heavy metal

it probably works in similar ways, emotionally, to pop music - albeit pop music surfing a sonic tsunami

so very otm

ALSO, he's a genuinely unreal vocalist. might be even more talented a vocalist than a guitarist even. although producer and arranger above all.

his vocal range is unreal. can't believe he's still letting those blood boiling screams out at his age

brad's college gf sounds cool

I'm old enough to recall the music press when he was Steve Vai's young kōhai for an album and tour. Not that I gave a shit about Vai's music, but i had a lot of guitarist mates.

I remember a pre-Terria intie Devin did for Lamentations of the Flame Princess zine (my copy of which disintegrated long ago) where he went on and on about how Terria was the result of all these new sounds he was hearing in his head and capturing on instruments thanks to some anti-dep or anti-bipolar meds he had begun taking in the preceding months. I think sobriety was a factor too iirc. You can tell his headspace is light years away from the relentlessness of the prior 3 albums.

Terria's def my 2nd fav behind Ocean Machine.

Also good to know I'm not the only mutterer of the "olives" stuff.

spending the morning listening to accelerated evolution which is just the best

wish we had enough people to do a devin trax poll.

imo we should all just compile ten-song ballots and post them here or something

Will yoooou saaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaave meeeeeeeeeeeee? *decending riff* ...baaaabe...baaaaaaaaaabe...baaaaaaaaaaaaaabe..

lets do it. might take me some time to decide my ten but its been fun w people calling out gems in the discography so far.

I will need to listen to about 7 albums - the only certainty is a #1 for The Mighty Masturbator, because it is everything I am

yeah i think if we're including syl and casualties of cool then i uh need to revisit several records

me 2. but looking forward to it.

honestly this is impossible. no. 1 would prob be "earth day" though

like earth day, funeral, kingdom, sunday afternoon, hyperdrive, the fluke, tiny tears uhhhh

jesus christ i forgot how much i loved alien

boo @ the ppl who hate alien upthread

i always want to like ki when i revisit it but it's just.... strange and unavailable. i think townsend was trying to make an expansive record like terria but in a different way. unfortunately it mostly sounds like a stoner metal record without distortion

i like "gato" still

actually i meant "heaven send" which is a better "gato." what a weird record

Ki's the only DT record I could probably stomach any more, tbh. Far as I remember the title track's pretty great.

I'm not going to badmouth the guy but a couple of years ago very suddenly I simply stopped enjoying his music. It's weird. Unfortunately though the way my tastes have shifted I've increasingly found some major aspects of his whole "thing" unpalatable (overly compressed shiny production, goofy attempts at humour...)

Not going to rule out coming back round to him in time though.

the title track of ki is great!

probably the best thing i've discovered in exhaustively listening to his discography this time around is epiclouder, the bonus disc for epicloud. those uh demos are amazing!

Ki's the only DT record I could probably stomach any more, tbh. Far as I remember the title track's pretty great.

I'm not going to badmouth the guy but a couple of years ago very suddenly I simply stopped enjoying his music. It's weird. Unfortunately though the way my tastes have shifted I've increasingly found some major aspects of his whole "thing" unpalatable (overly compressed shiny production, goofy attempts at humour...)

Not going to rule out coming back round to him in time though.

― ultros ultros-ghali, Wednesday, September 9, 2015 6:08 AM (6 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Feel like I could see this happening with me every few years with him, but it hasn't happened yet. Ive always kinda stayed at arms length from his music with only a true deep dive over the last few months.

i think this is my top ten

Earth Day
Kingdom
Funeral
Hyperdrive
Shine
The Fluke
Zen
Slow Me Down
Planet Rain
Tiny Tears

and bc that feels really cruel here's the following ten

Regulator
Storm
Happy Birthday
Ki
Bastard
Far Beyond Metal
Midnight Sun
Stagnant
The Mighty Masturbator
Vampira

Not ignoring your post! Just still working on mine, had a few albums I still needed to get through. Physicist isn't really very good is it, Kingdom is def the standout.

physicist has kingdom, material, planet rain, all top 20 devy material but it's def one of his lesser albums

Something seems off on the production of that album.

My list atm consists of basically every song on Accelerated Evolution

Something seems off on the production of that album.

oh yeah, definitely, his heaviest solo record and there's basically no bottom end, so it's just flying past you

yeah def having a hard time getting into it cos of that.

Gotta say the acoustic version of Funeral is hypnotic and heartbreaking. Crazy how reg version sounds so transcendent and uplifting in comparison.

new one's out next week but is also out there rn. the theme this time around is positivity! he rerecorded "truth" (and it sounds great and works surprisingly well tbh) and there's a ween cover

it's his longest dtp record since deconstruction/ghost fwiw

love this guy but i've only ever really listened to Terria and Addicted, maybe its time to go deeper

ocean machine!!!!

It is... the best album ever recorded

omg

yeah it's like the perfect dreampop-metal album, and he did it more or less on the first throw

it's considerably more mellow imo

I like mellow Devy tbh , i'll have to give it a listen

if i could like convince the guy to do a tour and perform Ocean Machine-Biomech in its entirety though i'd die happy

opening track super nice imo

Yah it’s frontloaded

off the back of relistening to everything/listening to the ones i didnt get to, i've been listening to the podcasts he did during lockdown, which are basically a chronological and very in depth look at each album. So far just up to terria but it's probably some of the most honest and self exposing autobio work i've heard from a musician. well worth checking out. first one here:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=q2vpT_8zKp4

yeah those pods are very good... long tho.

I like the whole of Lightwork! really a great listen

if i could like convince the guy to do a tour and perform Ocean Machine-Biomech in its entirety though i'd die happy

https://www.discogs.com/master/1389963-Devin-Townsend-Project-Ocean-Machine-Live-At-The-Ancient-Roman-Theatre-Plovdiv

Haven't seen it myself, sort of took a Devin break for a few years, but I'm feeling the twitching. I'll have to check it out.
(And the end of the Live at the Royal Albert Hall show, the Ocean Machine triptych finale as it were, is mind blowing. I've never seen him live but I need to.)

I saw him on the metal cruise in 2020 and he played a wiiiide range of material but he stunned us with "All Hail the New Flesh" and "Detox" from City.