The Devin Townsend Band — Accelerated Evolution
I'm sure Accelerated Evolution is a fine album, but it does feel different when compared to Devin's previous work. It's easy to blame the newly formed band around him, like I did with the last Strapping Young Lad album, but I won't do that. The lack of magic is something I blame Devin for. Not that Accelerated Evolution is a complete lackluster effort, there are a couple of good tracks. Devin does a good job on the songs and he wrote a couple of nice riffs, but, there is always a 'but', I miss the evolution.
You can call your album Accelerated Evolution, but if the music is the opposite of that, the title doesn't make much sense. On all of his previous albums Devin took some of his older ideas and combined them with new ones. Accelerated Evolution does that as well, but not as much as before. It's more of the old and less of the new, and I don't like that. Accelerated Evolution sounds like it's been written and recorded on auto-pilot. The biggest drawback is the songwriting. I can be happy with no evolution at all if the songwriting is perfect, but it's not. I can only pick four good songs out of the nine available. The (almost) instrumental track Away is actually the least interesting song on the album. It repeats the same melody for almost seven minutes. It starts out fine, but it get's boring halfway through. My favourite tracks are Depth Charge, Storm, Slowdown and Random Analysis. These four still hold the quality I look for while listening to Devin's work.
This may all sound a bit harsh, but I'm quite dissapointed with Devin's last two albums. I'm not sure what went wrong, but I think two projects at once is a little bit too much for the guy. Accelerated Evolution is better than the last Strapping Young Lad, but just not one of his finest moments. The album is not easy to put your finger on. On one hand I have a hard time writing negative things about one of my favourite artists, on the other hand, it's what I think of Accelerated Evolution and I wish it was a little bit more on the positive end of the spectrum. A small dissapointment. Devin fans should get it, others should get all the previous mentioned albums.