On “Stay There”, Devin Townsend sings: “I see the world through a different lens.”
You can say that again.
It is over 30 years since he was fronting Vai when MV saw them open for Aerosmith. Since then, we’ve seen him supporting The Wildhearts — a band he was in for a bit — and in what amounted, in Strapping Young Lad, to a death metal band that appeared to have swallowed the end of the world and chased it with industrial-grade caffeine.
In recent years, though, he’s settled — if Devin Townsend ever really settles — into something lush, progressive, and far more accessible than you’d imagine from a man whose brain still appears to operate at several speeds above the rest of us.
Even by those standards, “The Moth” is something else.
This is a 24-part rock opera, symphonic prog-metal fever dream, self-help apocalypse and studio monument all at once. When the opening track is called “Semi-prologue”, you know you’re deep in prog territory before you’ve even taken your coat off. It begins with choral grandeur, Townsend’s voice rising like the narrator of a civilisation’s last dawn, and then “War Beyond Words” does what he has always done best: opens the gates into batshit madcap metal and somehow makes chaos sound arranged rather than accidental.
Those are the extremes “The Moth” works in. After the attack comes the calm of the title track and “Ode To My Eye”; tiny pieces in the wider machine, but important ones, because this album does not behave like a normal record. It moves like a stage production. Scenes arrive, dissolve, return and mutate. “Enter The City” hints at the scale of the thing, but really, such is the scope of “The Moth” that we may never fully understand it anyway. That might be half the point.
“Covered By Causes” is where the thing properly takes flight. Nasty, nightmarish and then suddenly blooming like a new dawn, it feels like one of the epic central chapters of the tale. The female vocal is sensational, cutting through the madness with something human and almost divine. “Lexin”, by contrast, pulses with electronics and dread, adding the feeling that the whole enterprise is less an album than a ride you perhaps should have signed a waiver for.
By the time “A Proxy For God” has offered an icy blast of black metal and “The Mothers” has further blurred whatever line you thought existed between theatre, metal, choir and hallucination, the thing essentially defies explanation. Then comes “Orion”, and somehow Townsend finds a song in it all. “Believe in yourself, Orion,” he sings, while all kinds of noises, textures and voices swarm around him. This is the trick, really. Devin Townsend can stack absurdity on top of absurdity and still leave you with something oddly singable.
“Stay There” contains that different lens line, and it feels like the thesis of the record. “Home At Night” is so theatrical you could genuinely take it to the stage, while “Intermission” does exactly what it says. As a chance to gather your thoughts it’ll do. Go and grab a choc-ice. See you back here in five.
Not that it becomes any clearer. “Lexin Returns” and “The Clergy” re-open the portal, “Prepare For War” strikes an ominous, apocalyptic tone, and “The Big Snit” is further proof that the musicianship here is absurd. The drums, the orchestration, the guitars, the voices, the sheer arrangement of all this: it is less a band playing songs than a whole ecosystem being made to breathe.
“Silver Princess” brings in a new morning as Townsend looks for regeneration, but by “A Life In Review” things feel like they’re unravelling again. “Metamorphosis” is the change, of course, and “Stained Hearts” genuinely unsettles. “We landed on our feet,” it goes, but you aren’t entirely sure where you’ve landed, or whether feet are much use there.
“Let Go” has almost the sense of the credits rolling into an abyss, and then, because this is Devin Townsend and because no one else would, the whole thing ends with “We Don’t Deserve Dogs”. It sounds ridiculous written down. On the record, it feels oddly perfect. You come through at the end. Baffled perhaps. Exhausted, definitely. But through.
It is always tempting to think of Townsend as a mad scientist type, working his music out feverishly in the studio on a level us mere mortals don’t understand. That’s certainly the case here. Frankly, you could listen to “The Moth” — all 70 minutes of it — and not have a clue what’s going on. Maybe no one does except the genius who made it.
But that doesn’t make it impenetrable. It makes it fascinating. It makes it brave. It makes it one of those records that asks you not just to hear it, but to surrender to it.
“The Moth” is surely Devin Townsend’s definitive statement.
Rating 9/10
