“Too late / No sense in freaking out / Hailing the cause of pain / But I’m on the runway / I’M ON THE RUNWAY!” Devin Townsend bears his heart and soul in this battle between good and evil, with its orchestral metallic, cookie monster approach on ‘War Beyond Words’ from his new album, The Moth. A decade in the making, his new album details themes about the story of the human experience from birth. With its pounding beats, choir, classical music, and a blend of progressive and death metal rolled into one hot and spicy smoothie, you never know what to expect once Devin gets his engines running.
Following up with PowerNerd, The Moth is the imaginative movie inside your head, featuring rock-opera momentum as it becomes a journey into a personal narrative from the time you were born to the day you die. Whenever you put on a Devin Townsend album, you know you’re about to witness something challenging, given a front-row seat to what he’ll do next.
Whether you get it or you don’t, you have to appreciate the challenges Townsend presents to his listeners as they embark on this exploration of self-acceptance. With a lineup that includes Zappa alumni Mike Keneally, The Darkness’ Darby Todd, Sikth’s James Leach, Anneke Van Giersbergen, OU’s Lynn Wu, Steve Vai (yes, the Steve Vai, whose relationship with Devin goes back to Steve’s 1993 album Sex & Religion), and the Noord Nederlands Orkest, they know they’re not just members of a band but are lending Devin a helping hand to bring this story to life.
‘Enter the City’ serves as an instant, futuristic warning with a chant-like choir, blaring riffs, and pounding beats. It features Magma-like explorations reminiscent of their Mekanik days (“An awful lot depending on the weather / So we die / ALL WE ARE?! / No way”). The song escalates in intensity, as Devin unleashes his rage to escape this hellhole once and for all.
Lynn’s vocalisations, followed by Anneke’s duet with Devin on ‘Covered by Clauses’, set sail into a spiritual journey filled with wonder and pastoral textures. Meanwhile, ‘Lexin’ and ‘Lexin Returns’ delve deeper into an electronic nightmare, which I believe Lynn Wu unveils, revealing a nightmarish underworld that isn’t for the faint of heart, as orchestral horn sections deliver the final blow, signalling newcomers that this is going to be a long day in the new city, where the leader rules with an iron fist.
There’s a sense of a massive reality check coming to the forefront—a huge wake-up call to The Moth, whichever way you interpret it. Between ‘A Proxy for God’ and ‘The Mothers’, we find ourselves in this new city, entering territory with a sci-fi twist, something straight out of the stories from the adult-illustrated fantasy magazine Heavy Metal.
It presents a rumbling, epic-like classical metal dystopian landscape in which Devin gives his band members carte blanche to witness the eerie waltz unfold before our very eyes. This is unprecedented, but Anneke becomes the fairy godmother, singing the lines, “I see your mind in your eyes / I see your eyes on the door.” But we aren’t talking about Disney’s Cinderella; we’re discussing a feature-length adult-animated movie that gives the corporate falsetto mouse the giant middle finger.
‘Silver Princess’ becomes the dance of death, with battlefield-like arrangements for the rhythm section to follow the orchestra in this intense heat, leading to a descent into the deep, dark world that the city has become—a brink of chaos reminiscent of what both Rand and Orwell envisioned in their novels. And that’s where ‘Stained Hearts’ kicks in.
With its Danny Elfman-esque intro, Anneke fills the void, hoping for a chance at resurrection and a new beginning to see where we go next. The Moth is not for the faint of heart, but you have to give Devin a lot of credit for bringing this story to life as he moves toward more mind-blowing momentum in hard rock, prog, orchestral metal, avant-garde, surrealism, and all of the ingredients found in his new album.
