YMMV / Devin Townsend

• Anvilicious: Much of Strapping Young Lad's Self-Titled Album is given over to ranting about war ("Relentless"), rape ("Rape Song") and other atrocities, which was actually Devin's primary impetus for getting the band back together.
• Archive Panic: Has definitely reached this status with the gigantic discography seen on the main page, especially when one keeps in mind that many of these albums (e.g. Epicloud, Transcendence, Casualties of Cool, Empath, probably others) have been given special editions with bonus discs that are around as long as the albums they accompany.
• Awesome Music: A shitload of it.
  • "The Death of Music" from Ocean Machine tops them all.
  • Album-wise, City, Alien, Ocean Machine: Biomech, Infinity, Terria, Ziltoid the Omniscient, and Deconstruction are often regarded as some of his finest works.
  • The intro to "Juular" in The Retinal Circus starts with Devin snarking at his "evil self," ending with "I say to the Devil, I say...BRING IT!" followed by a sudden crash into the song's opening
  • Even if he won't acknowledge it as one of his best albums, "Namaste" in Physicist can make you headbang for the entire song.
  • "Kingdom", in part due to Devin's ability to go seamlessly from clean operatic singing to his insane Metal Scream. "Deadhead" also has excellent examples of this.
  • From Dark Matters, "March of the Poozers" is a ludicrously catchy yet heavy song.
• Critical Dissonance: Strapping Young Lad early on was very much this, gaining massive praise from metal critics but just not reaching a general audience, with the first album being a commercial bomb, selling less than 200 copies in the first two years. It was even tough for record labels to swallow, leading him to be rejected from multiple, including Roadrunner who told him "This is just noise". Thankfully by the end their popularity increased quite a bit.
• Epic Riff: A lot of them, especially in Strapping Young Lad songs. "The New Black" and "Force Fed" are great examples. Amongst his solo work, "Kingdom" is a standout example.
• Fan Nickname: Hevy Devy, The Mad Professor.
• Funny Moments: So much, he has his own page.
• Germans Love David Hasselhoff: While he does have a decent sized fanbase in North America, he's far more popular in Europe. (Particularly in the UK).
• Growing the Beard: Many Strapping Young Lad fans felt that City was when that project really took off for him.
• Memetic Mutation: This picture◊ became pretty popular and has been reposted a lot.
  • You can find almost as many YouTube videos of "vocal coach reacts to first listen of 'Kingdom'" as you can of "vocal coach reacts to first listen of 'Pisces'". "Deadhead" has proved to be another popular choice for this.
• Most Wonderful Sound: Devin's clean vocals can be counted on to be absolutely delightful to listen to — and his harsher vocals are pretty kickass too — but if the reaction vids on YouTube are any indication, Devin's vocals in his live EMG TV performance of "Kingdom" deserve special mention. Of note is the way people react to the first verse and his ability to seamlessly alternate between clean and Harsh Vocals.
  • "Why?" from Empath absolutely falls into this. Apart from what may the best example of Devin's more operatic vocals he's ever given, we also have the beautiful orchestra and the choir singers backing him up.
  • Remarkably, he's not a formally trained singer, meaning he developed his technique on his own. You can find interviews with him where vocal coaches analyse all the techniques he uses, and his response is basically, "I dunno, man. I just do what sounds good."
• Misaimed Fandom: According to Devin:
  Strapping Young Lad started as the giant middle finger, and then suddenly there were people saying "Yeah! Tell us we're assholes!"
  • Perhaps more horrifyingly, Word of God indicates that Devin is dissatisfied with "Rape Song" because apparently some people misinterpreted it as a pro-rape song (with lyrics like "Rape is just cause for murdering/Waste life/Die bastard die bastard burn" one assumes that some people didn't actually bother reading them). Of course, this is far from the only time this has happened in rock history; Nirvana and Hüsker Dü had the same problems with "Polly" and "Diane" respectively.
• Moment of Awesome: Performing a sellout show at the legendary Royal Albert Hall in London. He performed the Dark Matters half of Z2 in its entirety and, in the second set, finally performed "The Death of Music" for the first time since he wrote it 18 years prior. And it was glorious.
• Narm Charm: The chorus of "Stagnant" is incredibly cheesy ("And I feel it in my heeeEEEEEeeeeEEAAAAADD! Wooooo...") but the song still manages to be great despite (or because) of it.
• Nightmare Fuel:
  • "Deathscope" off of Casualties of Cool. Sounds like the same ghostly rockabilly as the other songs on CoC until you notice Devy growling under the main vocals followed by him screaming at the top of his lungs right before a barrage of white noise. This leads into the same simple riff being played as if outside of a vehicle, creating the effect of being left behind. The piece ends with a lonely ambience along with a voice over from Che.
  • "God, quiet! Just a little bit of quiet, please! Just stop the noise for once...PLEASE!!"
  • "S.Y.L" from Strapping Young Lad's debut album Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing. It starts with a rather cute sounding child telling a story about a bear eating children and suddenly gets overtaken by an eerie droning followed by loud metallic banging until we hear electric sounds accompanied by Devin screaming as loud as he can. The first verse is particularly chilling, not helped by Devin's aggressive, raspy vocals.
  I am the coming of a new age
  Past your shit by far
  I was a puzzle in your sick life
  But will never be a piece anymore
  Because I worked through your fucking bullshit
  And I worked through your fucking lies
  Now I'm working on the edge
  With a thousand times the stress
  So I can damn you down to size
  • The screaming woman that's heard at the start of "Bad Devil". She sounds like she's either writhing in agony, absolutely terrified or both.
  • His conversation with his "evil self" in The Retinal Circus. It's just a head floating in a black space.
  • The cover for Infinity◊ features a naked Devin looking at you with what's essentially a Slasher Smile.
  • "Info Dump", the last song from Strapping Young Lad's Alien, has to be one of the most unnerving uses of white noise to date. Couple that to the ever-growing loudness curve and the scream in the end, and you get a really disturbing aural experience.
  • Speaking of screams in the end, the ear-piercing shriek at the end of "Things Beyond Things" from Ocean Machine will leave you in shambles. The effect is compounded due to the album being in the softer side of Devin's work. Crosses over as an Awesome Moment when the scream closes out the 2017 Plovdiv Roman theatre live performance of Ocean Machine, to the crowd's delight.
  • Two songs: "Shitstorm" and "Oh My Fucking God". There's a reason both songs sit at Level 11 of the Mohs Rock and Metal Hardness Scale
• Signature Song: "Kingdom" for his solo work.
  • "Love?" for Strapping Young Lad with "Detox" as a close second.
• So Okay, It's Average: Physicist, upon release, was pegged as okay but undoubtedly Dev's weakest album to that point (arguably, it still is). He immediately wrote and recorded Terria, usually considered one of his best and most personal works.
  • Regarding instead Strapping Young Lad, the Self-Titled Album had a reception similar to: "it's actually good, but ultimately forgettable". After that, there comes Alien, widely regarded as Devin's greatest work since City and excluding Ziltoid.
• Spiritual Successor: Zimmer's Hole, not the least of which due to the overlap in musicians with Strapping, but also E.Val seems to be channeling Devin's vocals, to the point some fans thought it really was Devin.
• Sweet Dreams Fuel: Many of his albums have plentiful supplies of this, even some of the heavy ones. "The Greys" from Ziltoid is a very pleasant song, especially towards the ending. Ki, Epicloud, Transcendence, and Empath are overall very upbeat albums as well, though most of them have some heavy moments. Even Addicted, despite being pretty heavy, is very uplifting overall. Most of Casualties of Cool could qualify as well, despite occasional Nightmare Fuel moments. Ghost probably takes the cake, though.
• Tear Jerker: During his live performance of "Love?", which is already a very moody and aggressively chilling song, for the "Retinal Circus", guest guitarist and former bandmate Jed Simon is visibly crying halfway through the song, knowing that this will be the last time he'll ever get to play a Strapping Young Lad song live alongside Devin Townsend. Jed Simon in an interview even compared it to a funeral. That said, it mixes with a Heartwarming Moment when he mentions that he is grateful to have been given the opportunity to give said final performance and that he was happy to be a part of it.
  • A lot of his more emotional solo work gets some of this. Due to occasional Word Salad Lyrics, it's often only due to being melancholic and overly emotional in melody and singing. "Deadhead" is the premiere example.
  • "Funeral", his reaction to the senseless murder of one of his classmates, Jesse Cadman. It doesn't actually sound all that depressing until you listen to the lyrics. "He was killed walking home by a group of kids that wanted his hat," Devin recalled. Although he and Jesse weren't close friends, he was a close friend of Jesse's sister, and Devin was asked to speak at the funeral. "I remember I hadn't anticipated they were gonna bring the body out, and I just panicked. I couldn't cope with it, and I wasn't alone in that, either. It was a real heavy time for a lot of people, because it was our first experience with that sort of thing, and it was senseless."
• Ugly Cute: Poozers, the loyal race of creatures from the planet Titan that invade Earth in Z2.