Review by Sonny for Strapping Young Lad - Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing (1995)
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.