Strapping Young Lad
City

THE REVIEW

Anger consumes. It is a cursed demon that corrodes you inside, digs deep and hurts with its poisoned claws. It feeds on its host like a parasite until it is so large that it completely destroys it. In the current modern civilization, anger surrounds us and is continuously fueled by that bubbling and chattering tumult commonly referred to with the generic term 'people', a shapeless mass with a single mindset whose only goal is to transfer its frustration onto someone for the sole purpose of conforming them to its system of thought, easily definable with the adjective 'idiocy'. The target of this continuous and systematic attack is the madmen, those poor fools who still believe in values like freedom of thought, respect, and the much-maligned live and let live. It's even sadder if these lunatics are also interested in blasphemies like music, literature, art, in short, if they have even the slightest inclination towards culture in general. Rejected, treated as lepers, these individuals endure the pressures of cities that seem to breathe down their necks, never granting a moment of respite, and it's precisely in this humus that anger is fueled and grows, a monster to be kept at bay day by day with medications and prayers to often deaf deities. Then there's Heavy Metal, a release valve, a vehicle through which to channel those screams that break through your ribcage and keeping them inside costs immense and constant effort. Because let's be honest, we might say we like Metal for the technique, for the atmospheres, or for some other reason that doesn't come to mind right now, but the real reason we grind our ears with records like "City" by Strapping Young Lad is one: to have someone else scream in our place! Someone might also tell me to go to hell, but deep down you know that what I say is the truth. In a mix of Death Metal, Thrash Metal, and Industrial like the one proposed by Devin Townsend, there is only anger, mental illness, marginalization, and pain. Those screams get inside you because, in the end, they are yours too, you too are lost in the city that closes in on you and watches you like an Orwellian Big Brother that only wants to see you crawl at its feet, begging. Townsend builds a musical universe that reeks of smog and blinds like sharp steel edged with blood: syncopated rhythms, sometimes fast, sometimes frantic, with drum patterns from an out-of-control Gene Hoglan, a behemoth that overwhelms everything and everyone with a use of the double pedal that is never exaggerated but damn effective and brutal. On this scaffold move Jed Simon (guitar) and Byron Stroud (bass), capable of putting together an impenetrable wall of sound. Try to break through it, you shouting mass of crap, try!!! To all this is added the voice of that damned Devin Townsend, now abrasive like sandpaper, now melodic and lost, which when it leans on the synth base becomes the emblem of despair set to music. The good Canadian doesn’t need scream, growl, pig squeal, inhale, or anything else; he hits hard with the honesty of someone screaming in your face. Try listening closely to the melodic break in "Detox" or the unsettling advance of "Room 429" and then tell me: it's all dark and gloomy, with a few flashes of neon lights that, swinging from side to side like a half-burned-out bulb hanging by a thread, make everything more unsettling than ever.

This is the album of Gibsonian cowboys, those who travel through cyberspaces with iridescent lights in their minds, leaving behind a series of zeros and ones that in binary spell out a loud and gloomy 'fuck you'. Townsend and company travel the rails of madness, going from side to side. The orchestral carpets staged by the Canadian are dark and thick like a black drape, they smell of exhaust fumes and have the vacant gaze of a hallucinated and terrible trip. There is no room for light in "City", it is a work that destabilizes and intimidates, bringing out the listener’s anger and sadness, leaving them at the end stunned and exhausted. A terrible and at the same time fascinating experience because in front of the work of Strapping Young Lad, there are no masks that hold: anger and tears come out in the same way, but the awareness of not being alone calms and dries like the touch on the skin of a soft silk handkerchief.

Many say that Heavy Metal is not music for everyone; well, albums like this only confirm this statement, at least for me. Now, before closing, I wanted to point out that in the version of "City" that Century Media released to celebrate its twenty-five years of activity as a record label, there is, in addition to a live album and various demos, a track excluded from the first print of the 1997 album, a splendid song that has little to envy the other nine. It's called "Centipede", go listen to it.