DEVIN TOWNSEND – PowerNerd

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7.0

• Bands:
  DEVIN TOWNSEND
• Duration: 00:44:01
• Available from: 10/25/2024
• Label:

• Inside Out

Streaming not yet available

Devin Townsend's irrepressible creativity has found many shapes and colors over the years. Strapping Young Lad, The Devin Townsend Project, Casualties of Cool, ambient records, up to, of course, his long and ever-changing solo career. After the pandemic album, “Lightwork”, we were convinced that the next studio chapter in Devin's story would be “The Moth”, the orchestral project that the Canadian artist has been working on for years. Instead, somewhat surprisingly we found ourselves in our hands, “PowerNerd”, a completely different album, which seems to be born from an anomalous creative impulse.
Devin, perhaps precisely to detach himself from the obsessive care he is applying to “The Moth”, has consciously decided to write an album in one go, renouncing (in part) the myriad of stratifications that characterize his sound, to throw himself in a liberating way into a simpler and more immediate record. The title track, in this sense, is a perfect calling card: a direct song, which we would easily define as hard rock, on which the classic sound of Devin Townsend is applied. Works? Here I am. And if the entire album had been written along the lines of this first song, once again Devin would have fooled us, shuffling the cards on the table without ever losing his bearings.
Instead, “PowerNerd”, track after track, follows a somewhat strange path, as if it were ultimately incapable of letting itself go at full speed. “Falling Apart” and “Ubelia”, for example, re-embrace the airy and majestic style of Townsend's recent past, as does the excellent “Gratitude”. This is not necessarily a criticism: “Gratitude” is easily one of the best songs on the album, and yet, just when Devin almost unconsciously returns to his comfort zone, it seems to us that something is stuck in the entire project.
The desired immediacy of the album, written in just eleven days, finds its fulfillment in the fastest songs, but in the most epic and grandiose moments, this choice proves to be a double-edged sword, transforming the whole thing not so much into a direct album and energetic, but rather to a normal Devin album, just less polished than usual.
Then it's clear, for a champion like him it's not at all difficult to write valuable songs and in “PowerNerd” there are several, from the aforementioned “Gratitude” to “Glacier”, which starts like a monolith and becomes dreamy and delicate and then opens up to become even more gigantic. Yet, underneath, we are left with the feeling of a record that really failed to deliver on what it promised, stopping halfway. At this point, then, a piece like “Ruby Quaker” is better, a sort of strange ode to coffee, which mixes country, falsetto choruses, and passages of total chaos. It may be senseless madness, and yet there we feel that total and childish freedom that we expected.
“PowerNerd”, however, is just one piece, yet another, in a journey that contains countless artistic personalities. As we write these lines, Devin has already announced that he has not only completed “The Moth”, but also a third album, entitled “Axolotl” and described as a alien strangeness. We are more than certain that Devin will be able to amaze us for a long time to come and that this, all things considered, is simply a less brilliant chapter than usual, in an endless discography.