Strapping Young Lad - Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing (1995)^{Release ID: 868}

For some reason Devin Townsend has always rubbed me up the wrong way. He is obviously an immensely talented individual and I have no real basis for saying this, but he seems to revel in his own cleverness and his sometimes goofy humour just gets my back up. I was once lent a couple of SYL albums by a workmate (I think one was Alien), but I couldn't get into them at all. Not exactly a very promising preamble to this review then, but I did go into this with an open mind and now, after half-a-dozen full listen-throughs, I think I have probably got everything out of this that I am going to.

Industrial metal, to me, should be innately super-heavy as it is intended to replicate the sound of heavy machinery in operation and to this end SYL have been, in the main, successful in this endeavour here. The combination of the riffs and the full-blooded rhythm section, which includes both real and programmed drums, produce an impressively heavy sound that, at times, rivals even the mighty Fear Factory at their best. There are also some killer hooks in a couple of the tracks, particularly early on in the album (that again sound a fair bit like hooks FF would produce).

From what I can glean from the internet this is basically a Devin Townsend solo album with a few guest musicians as well as being songs collected from a number of demos - and it shows. Despite the nursery rhyme nonsense that bookends the album it doesn't feel at all consistent, but rather than a coherent album it feels more like a compilation of disparate tracks. This is not at all aided by Townsend's vocal performance being markedly different on nearly every track, on Goat, for example, it seems like he is just taking the piss and sounds like it is based on Bill Hicks' least funny sketch, Goatboy. That "goofy" humour, as exemplified by the awful closing track and the Black Adder-plagiarising album title, combined with Devin screaming "I fuckin' hate you" over and over on the opener like a spoilt teenage brat and ruining what is otherwise a pretty good track, turns me away from any of the good things he was doing elsewhere on the album.

Look, unlike Devin's screaming inner teen, I don't fuckin' hate this, but it is too inconsistent and exhibits an immaturity I struggled with, to be honest. There are a couple of tracks that I would be OK with on a Spotify playlist, In the Rainy Season and the groove of Critic, but other than that I am unlikely to return here.

"I am the coming of a new age, stained we still stand tall! I am the coming of a new age, and I will never fall!" Yes, a new age was coming, the age of one of the mightiest progressive metal masterminds, Devin Townsend! Well even though I lost interest in his solo material, the material of his former band Strapping Young is still with me. Let's begin my SYL review journey with the one album that started it all for Devy (not including his contributions to Steve Vai's Sex & Religion)...

I understand that this album isn't for the pure old-school thrash fans. Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing is basically heavy thrashy industrial metal with lots of noise and rage. Despite a few disorganized songs, the album comes out as a great beginning for Devy's massive career.

The journey begins with "S.Y.L." Holy sh*t, this is angry energy to make fans of industrial metal happy. It's quite genius how you can hear toddler Devy present his own play in the intro and then teen Devy as an A&W employee in the outro. Strapping Young Lad and Meshuggah are the two go-to bands for metal's heavy intensity in the 90s. Next up, "In the Rainy Season" continues to test out the anger that would be shoved up haters' f***ing a**es, adding to the album's general theme. There's also a well-placed clean chorus, an aspect later adopted by Soilwork. Another track, "Goat" is just silly and pointless, though the lack of seriousness is somewhat admirable. The album gets more interesting when you hear "Cod Metal King" sounding like a dance-metal track that should've been used for a vampire romance film like Twilight.

"Happy Camper (Carpe B.U.M.)" can be considered industrial grindcore insanity. "Critic" continues the savage riffing hellfire. Thrown into the mix is the wonderful "The Filler - Sweet City Jesus". I find the title hilarious because it's not filler at all. It's a great song with lots of interesting vocals and guitars.

Small subtle details make "Skin Me" enjoyable. Another song to have extreme potential is "Drizzlehell". That one can be considered a modern metal anthem despite the mechanical distortion and annoying beat. Now if there's one signature aspect Devy hasn't forgotten, it's his sense of humor in "Satan's Ice Cream Truck". It's like a children's song twisted into death metal, pretty much the Happy Tree Friends of metal music. Quite funny, but not really my thing.

In the end, we have a solid high-quality album of anger and humor that has marked the beginning of this Canadian metal man's adventurous journey. After two albums for one-time projects (Punky Brüster and Ocean Machine), Devin Townsend would bring his SYL sound to perfection in the band's next album City....

Favorites: "S.Y.L.", "In the Rainy Season", "Cod Metal King", "The Filler - Sweet City Jesus", "Drizzlehell"