Ten musicians on one stage, not a single click track in anybody's ear and not one backing track hidden in the wings: that is the premise of Order of Magnitude: Empath Live Volume 1, filmed at the Roundhouse in Camden on 12 December 2019, the penultimate night of the European tour behind Empath, and released on 23 October 2020 by InsideOut Music, under licence from HevyDevy Records, as a deluxe artbook with two CDs, a Blu-ray and a DVD, a 2CD and DVD digipak, a standalone Blu-ray, a 3LP and 2CD vinyl box and a digital album. The metronome stayed in its case. Everything on these sixteen tracks, an hour and forty-nine minutes of audio, follows from that one decision.
The Canadian composer who built Empath in 2019 out of choirs, orchestral writing and layer upon layer of studio voices, Devin Townsend, had every reason to fear the stage version of it, because a score that dense normally travels on tour inside a laptop. He hired people instead. Mike Keneally on guitar and keyboards, Markus Reuter on touch guitar, Morgan Ågren on drums, Nathan Navarro on bass, Diego Tejeida on keyboards, Ché Aimee Dorval on vocals and guitar, and Samantha Preis, Anne Preis and Arabella Packford as a three-voice choir: a pit orchestra assembled to break the click grid that most modern progressive metal is locked to. In the notes to the "War" clip on his own YouTube channel, posted 2 October 2020, Devin put the purpose plainly: "The whole idea with this concert was to experiment with playing songs from my catalog that didn't rely on backing tracks or clicks, so assembling 10 people onstage to do this was no small feat." The tour behind it was the first of three planned volumes. The pandemic cut its American leg short, and the volumes that followed never went on the road as planned.
The opening "Borderlands" sets the terms at once: a large riff, a tropical lilt and three singers doing in real time the work that a hard drive did on the studio record, while the mix keeps Devin's voice clean, forward and audibly unaided. The Empath material stays remarkably close to its studio scores, and that is the quiet miracle of it, because the scores were never written for human hands alone. The risk shows less in the arrangements than in the air around them. A record that was built on a hard drive was rebuilt on twenty ears, and it held.
A record that was built on a hard drive was rebuilt on twenty ears, and it held.
Then the archive opens, and this is where the evening earns its title. "War", a song from Infinity in 1998, is shared between Devin and Dorval as a duet, and the backing voices thicken it until a song written twenty-one years earlier sounds freshly scored for the human throat. Dorval is the hidden second lead voice of the whole set, and the block of four songs from Ki, the hushed 2009 record of the Devin Townsend Project, leans on her more than on anyone. "Gigpig Jam" is the improvised interlude where Morgan Ågren, a drummer of rare touch, turns a metal water bottle, a canteen and a metal fan into a percussion section and erases the line between rehearsal and recital. "Deadhead", from Accelerated Evolution in 2003, brings one of the most cathartic vocals of the night, and the room claps it home.
"Why?" is the hinge of the second half and its most theatrical stretch: the crowd is rehearsed into a call and response, hands on heads, answering with a single "beep", while Devin sings it in a tutu and Tejeida, the keyboardist of Haken, who had already played the support set with his own band that night, carries the orchestral parts alone. Devin's own note to that clip, posted on his YouTube channel on 16 October 2020, gave the credit where it belonged: "Kudos to Diego for being able to pull off a full symphony with only 4 limbs."
"Castaway/Genesis" follows as the most unstable passage of the record, a miniature rock opera that lurches between sections the way the studio original does, which Devin himself, in the notes to the "Genesis" clip on his YouTube channel on 28 August 2020, called an example of "musical anarchy". Ten players hold it together without a conductor's beat. Then comes the lift. "Spirits Will Collide", turned acoustic, becomes a hymn, and it is the emotional summit of the night. A live record earns forgiveness for almost anything when its choir is voiced properly, and the three singers here are voiced like a chamber ensemble rather than a backing track with faces. "Disco Inferno", the old song by The Trammps, is handed to Dorval with coordinated dancing behind her, and "Kingdom", first heard on Physicist in 2000, closes the set on one of Devin's strongest vocals of the evening.
The audio edition pays for the format, and the bill is specific. Half the comedy of this concert is visual: the Hawaiian shirts, the tiki bar where Tejeida mixes cocktails as the band walks on, the costume changes, the mirror ball, the tutu. On the two CDs the jokes arrive without their punchlines, the crowd game in "Why?" becomes a stretch of cheering you cannot see, and the length that flies by on screen can sag on a long drive. That looseness is freedom with the picture and indulgence without it, and the choice is clear: the Blu-ray, with its 46-minute documentary and the full staging, is the real release, and the audio is its very good reduction. That the record still reached number 29 on the UK Official Albums Sales Chart, and number 3 on the Rock and Metal chart, says how much reduction people were willing to buy.
Empath devotees who wondered whether its density could survive daylight get their answer here, and so do the doubters who have written off progressive metal concerts as recitals played against a laptop. It is proof, filmed on one December night, that a dense modern score can be carried by people alone. Take the video edition if you can. Take the audio if you must. Either way, the metronome is not missed.