The Devin Townsend Project
Ghost

"Ki" gave us a hint, now with this "Ghost" we go to the extreme. With this effort, the nerd genius of Devin Townsend manages to produce an album of only ballads, devoid of Growls and distorted guitars. Our composer's talents, his uncommon aptitude for melodies, were known to us for some time, and finally, a record of pure and simple melody has arrived. Truly exquisite songwriting, painstaking refinement, Ghost consists of a group of really good songs, taken one by one. Simple arpeggios, soft voices, expansive atmospheres, flutes. It’s hard to highlight the best episodes, definitely Feather and Heart Baby, Kawaii, and Ghost.

However, there's a "but." This album lasts seventy-two minutes and, despite all this redundant simplicity, despite all this exquisite melodic refinement, it is an exhausting feat to listen to it in one go. Or rather, if you try, with maximum concentration and the best intentions, you will inevitably get distracted, abandon it after half an hour, ending up thinking about something else. Thus, you won't realize that the last two tracks have neither head nor tail.
Why?
Because the melodies are too soft and the atmospheres too expansive, to the point of inducing drowsiness, or worse, to the point of boring the listener and their bored self. Not for nothing, the most complete piece is, perhaps, just Kawaii, with its two minutes and fifty seconds.

The strength of Devin Townsend's ballads in his regular albums is precisely their simplicity, which makes them appear as oases of peace in a stormy sea of distortion, but above all, their brevity (see Ah-Ih in Addicted). Presented all together like this, and with often unreasonable lengths, namely over six minutes, they produce an album where the whole results agonizingly less than the sum of the individual parts. Because this is not a post-rock group performing here, this is a Thrash artist who wants to create the good twin of the crude Deconstruction, and most probably it gets out of hand. If it were twenty minutes shorter, Ghost would be yet another stroke of genius.
And it's a shame because, I repeat, the potential of the individual songs (at least nine out of twelve) is really high.