Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing

What is this album? Well, the obvious answer is it's Heavy As a Really Heavy Thing by Strapping Young Lad, the debut LP from Devin Townsend's dementedly mad psyche. But that's not what I wanted to say, though. What is this album, really? According to him, it's the coming of a new age. It's also frenetic. Unhinged. Madness personified. Crazy. On the verge of collapsing altogether.

I don't think that's good enough, though. The best way I can describe it is as follows: This album has one foot in the grave and the other foot's slamming on the gas pedal so goddamn hard that the grave is only the first stop. This album is like mixing an I.E.D., Molotov cocktail, several hundred thousand sticks of TNT, a nuclear bomb, and whatever corrosive deadly explosive you can think of in a blender and distilling it down into a suppository. This album sounds as if all the wars of the world are taking place at the same time.

Yeah, uh.... Even that doesn't come close to summing up whatever the fuck this album even is.

The debut album by Strapping Young Lad is an interesting little piece of history. Looking back on this record and understanding where Devin's head was at the time of writing HAARHT, it's not hard to understand why this album came into existence in the first place. Much like the subsequent (and infinitely superior) follow-up that was City, it was written from the standpoint of someone young, angry, and sick to death of the minutia and bullshit of all the people around them. Devin is pretty well-known in interviews for his candid honesty about his music, what he thinks of it, and where his head was at the time of writing said music. I'll be honest, even what he says about this album on his official website doesn't really come close to describe exactly what lies within this odd, odd, odd as hell metal album.

According to the man himself, early versions of this record and what would become Ocean Machine were rejected from an old label, Relativity Records, for being too "schizophrenic." It then eventually got passed around from Roadrunner Records until it landed in the laps of Century Media. I'd say that sums it all up in one word: "Schizophrenic." This album seemingly shifts tones and styles and genres from one song to another and, in some cases, within the same song. When you have a song like "In the Rainy Season," a fast as hell death/thrash song change to this weird industrial song, it's such a jarring experience. As well, when you have a totally bonkers, skin peeling, on-the-razor's-edge-of-totally-caving-in kind of song then transition to a thrash-inspired one that feels comparatively sane and well-paced (not saying much if you know the songs I'm talking about), you sit there and wonder what the hell just happened in the studio to allow this to happen? In fact, there's only two really amazing songs on this album. The remaining songs range from decent to pretty bad to really fucking weird. Let's talk about them.

"S.Y.L." and "In the Rainy Season" open the album and are the two reigning champions, without question. They're the only two songs on here with any semblance of cohesion, forethought, and vision. Devin knew what he wanted to create with these: fast-paced, adrenaline pumping, hate-filled anthems laden with all the profanities of the rainbow. What's great about both of these songs, too, is that it shows early examples of his singing range. We would get more prominent examples shining through in later projects within and without Strapping but, for now, it's quite impressive hearing Devin go from a creepy whisper in a few bars to a howling banshee in the very next set of bars in "S.Y.L", transition seamlessly into the next song, as well as transition from frantic guitars, pummeling drum rolls and crazy intense fills to this slow, sort of chilled doomy passage in "In the Rainy Season." It's super impressive and shows just how much talent Devin had just looking at these two songs by themselves.

The following seven songs are pretty futile exercises in experimentation with varying levels of success. While songs like "Happy Camper (Carpe B.U.M.)" and "Critic" are pretty decent tracks, you then have songs like "Drizzlehell" that fail spectacularly to do anything to impress. It's clear Devin was flinging shit at the walls and seeing what would stick. Some shit smells better than others. Some shit is just plain weird like "Goat" and "Cod Metal King," two examples of two completely disparate styles coming together in a really odd way. In fairness, "Cod Metal King" has more things about that stick with me than "Goat" does. The former is utterly forgettable as it tries to be dark, but fails to make a favorable impression. The latter might be the first true example of industrial metal on this album as a thin, programmed drum beat pulse over a crackling set of riffs that roar incessantly and discordantly in the foreground. Devin's vocals sound a little muddied and buried in this one and he doesn't how much of his dynamic range on this one as he does on the next couple songs.

The ironically titled "Happy Camper (Carpe B.U.M.)" is the personification of sonic bipolarity. It's absurdly fast, Devin is screaming so loud and so fast that I don't even know what to say about it (listen to his performance at 2:21 onward and understand why this man's vocals are so lauded), the drums are impossibly fast, too - everything about this song is just fast. Beyond fast. Only the middle of it gives the listener a moment of respite. When put next to the rest of this piece, that moment is very brief. Kind of like a 'blink and you miss it' moment. "Critic" has its moments like the thrash break in the middle of the song that effortlessly carries the song towards its confusion and yet another fantastic vocal performance from Devin, but it's mostly forgettable.

I don't really have much to say about the remaining three songs because they're really not very good. "The Filler - Sweet City Jesus" certainly lives up to its name, "Skin Me" is a weird something piece that sounds like it embellishes ideas from early Fear Factory and Godflesh, meshes them together into a blender, and out comes this song that's kind of groovy and oddly paced, while "Drizzlehell" is just an ear-grating, painfully loud, incoherent mess that's without a shadow of a doubt, the worst song on the record.

Well....

Then we have the closer, "Satan's Ice Cream Truck." Now, out of all the songs on this album, this is far and away the absolute strangest. Hell, I'm go so far and say it's the strangest song in Devin's entire catalog, even more so than "Soul Driven Cadillac." It's really odd at the start with a shaking sound before opening up to this cheerful, circus-like tune played on some keyboards. A very simple distorted bass line kicks in that adds to the off-putting nature of it then, last, but certainly not least, we have Devin vocalizing. What he's doing here can only be described as a pedophile demon dancing while serving ice cream from the window of a bleached white van, the side of it adorned with the most crude and juvenile spelling of the delectable frozen confectionery: "Ice Kreem, 25 centz." As Devin sings all the while, cartoony swivel noises, squawking, and silly mouth noises serve to make the song just that unsettling, you can imagine the kids being lured in with the temptation to empty their piggy banks for the delicious ice cream treats, only to then be lured into the van to then be raped, mutilated, or enslaved because that whimsical part of the song transitions to an almost nightmarish hellscape that's short, but effective in leaving its listeners in a state of stupefied shock. This repeats one more time before the song ends with giggles and a distorted guitars fading behind a demonic growl of sorts. I can imagine the blood spatters of murdered children being left behind as the affectionately named Satan's Ice Cream Truck dashes away, yelling "I'LL BE BACK AGAIN NEXT WEEK!"

So there we have it. The debut album from the mind of the Canadian maestro himself and his band, Strapping Young Lad. To sum up, this album is confusing. It's unsettling. It's unnerving. It's weird. It's catatonic. It's bipolar as fuck. It's raw and dirty. And it's not very good. He says so himself. There are some good ideas here that, if left to incubate more, could've been better. As it stands, though, we have an album that's half-baked and mostly unpleasant to listen to. It's hard to recommend unless you're a hardcore fan of Devin Townsend and are willing to give anything he does a chance. To that end, if you're a newcomer, I'd say enter at your own risk.


Favorite tracks:
"S.Y.L."
"In the Rainy Season"
"Happy Camper (Carpe B.U.M.)"