Back To The Start; Devin Townsend’s 10 Greatest Albums

Dark Matters [Z2] (2014)

Source // themonolith.com

Usually when an artist chooses to directly follow up one of his best loved works, the results are earth-shatteringly crap. Fortunately,  Dark Matters is as funny, as touching and as bat-shit insane as the Ziltoid album before it only this time, epic is pushed to its logical conclusion with a 1000 piece choir (recorded in a football stadium, no less), a proper narrator and even more fearless experimentation with syncopation.

By the time you have taken on board female vocalists optimistically trilling over blast beats – “Earth” – the sound of an army of ballbags being whipped into manufacturing titanic war machines – “War Princess”- and the emotional finale of “Dimension Z”, you will be wondering how one person can have this much creative juice bubbling inside him!

In a genre such as metal that prizes technical ability and holds sacred a person’s right to individuality, it is truly something to encounter an artist who stands among the elite in more than one field; guitarist, vocalist, songwriter, producer, comedy voice-actor, Devin Townsend does it all.

If you haven’t already done so, do yourself a favour; go and check the man out.