26. Devin Townsend - "Lightwork"

Talking about subtlety, or more importantly not talking about subtlety, here comes the current King of multi-dimensional, multifaceted, and multilevel metal. Devin Townsend is fiendishly talented and doesn’t he know it. A child prodigy that has become a Renaissance man for highly convoluted progressive metal. Devin sees our music in four dimensions and has an innate God-given power to create textured and twisted pieces of music that bypass the need to be grounded in any one particular genre. 

Whilst his music has always had a level of diversity to it, “Lightwork” does see him make a conscious decoupling from the rampant progressive metal of previous releases. It ventures into territories that I can only be described as hyper-pop and sees the synths dialled up and the guitars put to one side.

The point with Devin is that whatever he sets his hand to, it is going to end up being intricate and interesting. I’m not even sure that the stuff on here is my usual cup of tea and I am adamant that I wouldn’t be reviewing this if it didn’t have his name adorning the cover. But the point is he has taken a style and genre that I will usually walk away from and made it enticing and indoctrinating. And that’s probably the best endorsement that a musician can ask for.