Strapping Young Lad
Alien

THE REVIEW

It's a starless night. The sky is as black as pitch and the moon shines high in the sky.
At a certain point, something catches your eye.....a tiny dot approaching at an ever-increasing speed, ever-increasing, ever-increasing.....until a huge spaceship lands ten meters away from you. The hatch opens and from that enormous intergalactic vehicle coming from who knows where emerges.......E.T.!!!!! No, kidding aside, only four shady characters can come out of that damn spaceship: the Strapping Young Lad.

Even though they don't have pointed ears, green skin, and enormous transparent eyes (but they're close), one can't help but wonder if the group led by the crazy (and horrendous!!!) Devin Townsend hasn't landed from some distant planet in some interplanetary galaxy where the rules of our world have all been overturned. The question becomes more than legitimate if we then set out to listen to the band's latest effort: Alien.
Self-defined by the band as "Chaos Metal", SYL's musical proposal is the most original, crazy, and energetic that currently exists in the now saturated extreme scene.

Alien, in particular, represents the complete maturation of the band's sound, further developing the narrative that Townsend had started with the fantastic City in 1997.
This latest work is not an easily assimilable album; it requires many listens to be fully understood and to appreciate every little detail: the impression, however, is of an album that is meticulously crafted at all levels, with painstaking attention to every detail. The tracks are constructed with a "dual soul," alternating the classic phases of pure sonic (and verbal too, here the fucks are plentiful) violence with slowdowns and openings, stunningly supported, as always, by Gene Hoglan's drums (the atomic clock, as written in the booklet), which once again manages to surpass himself in terms of speed, without taking anything away from the creativity of his rhythms.

Small details, we were saying...yes, because alongside the usual aggression, small arrangements, openings, and inserts are added that give a great depth to the ensemble of songs. Because if the unreserved aggression of Imperial kicks things off, then each track holds surprises, like the vocal polyphonies and marimba (!!!) in Skeksis, the children's choirs in Shitstorm and Possessions... little things that enrich and lend effectiveness to the music, making the assault less unreserved, but more effective and targeted. There are also more melodic episodes, like the beautiful Love? and Two Weeks, which even flaunts acoustic guitars and Pink Floyd-esque atmospheres.

When I first listened to this album, I was absolutely impressed: there are few bands like Strapping Young Lad, and even fewer like Devin Townsend, the "Frank Zappa of metal," the living proof that heavy metal is not just music for semi-angry adolescents with blinders on. After the release of Alien, it will be difficult for SYL not to repeat themselves or change direction, but who knows what these aliens from so far away will still have in store for us in the years to come.
The future of metal is all in those eleven songs.