The right-hand pedal of a piano lifts the dampers off the strings, so that every chord rings on into the next one until the harmony turns into a single held roar, and for the better part of three decades Devin Townsend has written music as if that pedal had been screwed to the floor. Guitars stacked until the stack becomes the instrument, choruses arriving inside the echo of the chorus before, a wall of sound with not one rest written into it. Lightwork, released by InsideOut Music on 4 November 2022 after a one-week delay, is the record on which he let a second foot near that pedal, and taught it, at the right moments, to lift.
Written through the pandemic years and recorded across four studios in British Columbia, The Warehouse, The Armoury and the Lighthouse in Vancouver and The Farm in Gibsons, with Garth Richardson, the GGGarth whose desk had already shaped records by Rage Against the Machine and Biffy Clyro, sitting beside him as co-producer, the album arrived after two records that wanted nothing to do with restraint. Empath, in March 2019, packed choirs, an orchestra and a procession of guest virtuosos into seventy-four minutes and flattened every music stand in the hall on its way out, and The Puzzle followed in December 2021. The former leader of Strapping Young Lad wanted songs this time, ten of them, in traditional shapes. He shared the controls with Richardson, a longtime friend, to get them. Asked by Jessie David of Metal Wani, in an interview published on 1 October 2022, about working with a producer, he said it "certainly pushed me out of my comfort zone and the benefits of it are something that will benefit my future work as well". Asked whether he saw himself working that way more often, he answered: "No."
You hear the experiment from the first bars. "Moonpeople" opens on a stark, bouncing rhythm under layers of his own voice and takes its time about the crescendo, a melody in no hurry to prove anything, with a chorus sweet enough to need no distortion underneath. The lineage is plain: this is the songwriter of the Devin Townsend Project's pop records, minus the urge to shout over his own tunes.
Then "Lightworker" opens like an overture, operatic voices, piano and orchestra laid out before the guitars return at full width, and it is the most theatrical five and a half minutes on the record, the one song that remembers Empath with affection. It is also where the new method shows most clearly. The wall of sound is all there, every layer of it, and yet each layer has air around it, and no chord is allowed to swallow the next phrase. The foot comes off the pedal between chords, and for once you hear the chords.
"Call of the Void", written with Mattias Eklund and Martin Kennedy, is radio rock from the middle of the 1980s with a chorus built to fill an arena at sound check, and on paper it should embarrass a man with this catalogue; it does not, because the melody is strong enough to carry the borrowed lacquer.
"Heartbreaker" is the centrepiece and the record's one real concession to the throat behind Strapping Young Lad's City: seven minutes of the heaviest riffing on the album, detours into progressive writing that would satisfy a band twice as fussy, a choir stacked on top of it all, and a late descent into a darkness the first four songs had politely declined to enter. When the riff finally lands, it slams down on the choir like the lid of a concert grand, and the choir keeps singing under it.
"Dimensions" is the strangest turn, a stuttering, almost danceable piece of industrial fuzz with Jonas Hellborg on additional bass and a guitar solo from Mike Keneally, the one track where the old appetite for noise is handed a part of its own. "Vacation" answers it with three minutes of folk-rock ease, Joy Lapps on steel pan and Hutch Hutchinson on bass: pretty, brief, and gone before it has said much. The pairing is the album in miniature. A dissonance, then its resolution, placed side by side so that you cannot miss the voice leading.
Here the voice leading stalls. A record whose whole argument is restraint pays for that argument in contrast, and between "Dimensions" and the closer the dynamics barely move: "Celestial Signals" and "Heavy Burden", the second with the Elektra Women's Choir among its voices, are well made and well voiced, and neither strikes as hard as the first half had already struck. The scream that made Townsend's name stays in its case for almost the whole hour. That was the decision. The decision has a price, and on any honest reading the middle of the record is where it is paid.
"Children of God" closes the record over ten minutes, building as patiently as "Moonpeople" began, harmonies and choirs piled up toward the biggest climax on the album, the place where the pedal goes all the way down again and every voice is allowed to bleed into every other, a benediction ten minutes long. It is earned, because the forty-five minutes before it have kept the method in reserve. The deluxe edition adds Nightwork, ten more songs that Townsend produced and mixed alone at the Lighthouse with Morgan Ågren on drums, and among them sits "Children of Dog", an alternate take of the closer. The two titles divide the labour plainly: what went through two pairs of hands is light, what Townsend kept to himself is the night shift. The public took the daylight version gladly enough, to number two on the UK Rock & Metal Albums Chart and number nine in Finland.
The foot comes off the pedal between chords, and for once you hear the chords.
A career built on excess yielded, this once, ten songs that mostly sit still long enough to be sung, and the trade cost almost nothing except the shock. "Heartbreaker", "Dimensions" and "Children of God" stand with the best songs he has put his name to in the last ten years; the rest is handsome, melodious and a degree too even, the sound of a loud man practising the discipline of playing quietly. What the record asks of you is patience with that discipline. What it pays back is the clearest view in years of the songwriter underneath the wall of sound, every note audible, and the rests between them written into the arrangement at last.