Devin Townsend - Deconstruction

Sometimes I listen to a new release and feel like I could fit the entire album in a shot glass. Some bands like to think that they’ve got a unique sound, so they pigeonhole themselves with their style and refuse to change it, lest they be seen as betraying their image. Devin Townsend doesn’t do this. Devin Townsend is on a mission: he has to make everything he records huge—not state-fair-pumpkin huge, circus-freak huge. Landkreuzer P-1500 Monster huge. He mixes his music so that every instrument is playing at one hundred percent power nearly the entire time, while including moments of serenity and softness to tease the listener into turning up the volume, only to be blasted away by the unfathomably low, hydrogen-bomb power chords. This process produces a record that sounds like Devin bought a retired missile silo, filled it with VX gas, set an orchestra on fire and gave his band a Chinook of black tar heroin, and told them to not stop playing until everyone in the orchestra died. ‘Deconstruction’ isn’t just the best death metal album I’ve heard all year; it’s one of the best metal albums I’ve heard in my life.

But what makes it worth your time?

It’s heavy. It’s really, really heavy. But heaviness alone does not a good album make. Pure death metal can get boring quickly, as the ears tend to get fatigued by constant wall-of-sound mixing. Townsend has the capability to create multi-layered soundscapes, delicate acoustic interludes and concoct tightly wound rock-opera tangents, while maintaining the devious, mathematical nature of extreme experimental death metal.

Not only that, but it’s hilarious. Deconstruction is a very loosely connected concept album about a man who goes to Hell and meets the devil, who offers him the powers of the universe in the form of a cheeseburger. The man is forced to deny the devils offer because he is a ‘vegamatarian.’ And that’s it. Outside of the story, the album is peppered with Townsend’s usual bizarre and puerile humor, with tongue-in-cheek self-deprecation and lyrics that read like the bitter ranting of a slighted schizophrenic.

“Beer!...Beer!...Beer!”

The complexity of the lyrics is somewhat of a cornerstone for anything Devin Townsend touches, but the musical density, the pure instrumental profundity is what makes him a true marvel. Townsend is like Robert Oppenheimer or Albert Einstein, and Deconstruction is his atomic bomb. He’s called in the absolute best minds from across the field to contribute to this masterpiece. He took Mikael Åkerfeldt (Opeth, Bloodbath) to do vocals on the savage anthem ‘Stand’, Joe Duplantier (Gojira), Paul Masvical (Cynic, Death) to provide vocals on Sumeria. He even called in the legendary Fredrik Thordenal (Meshuggah) to lend a solo to the title track. It’s not up for debate. This is one of the strongest, most complex and absolutely extraordinary metal albums out there today.

I hate to use such an overused word, but I feel that it applies here. It’s an epic.

That being said, if there was to be an album that would secure Devin’s name in the halls of greatness, this one isn’t it, simply because that album came years before when he released ‘Alien’. Everything since then has been successive victory laps, each release confounding and impressing critics, silencing competitors and blowing the minds of everyone in between. If you have ears and a love for heavy, uncompromising, extreme music, look no further. Deconstruction is worth every penny.  

(10/10)

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