Devin Townsend is one of life’s over-thinkers, wrapping his albums in layers of conceptual and psychological detail.
By contrast, PowerNerd, his twenty-second solo album, is driven by pure instinct, deliberately written in a nine-day burst of creativity and sounding all the better for it.
Unpromising title aside, PowerNerd dispenses with any extraneous tooling around to hit with the kind of brilliant melodic punch he hasn’t delivered in years. His recognisable modern-metal wall-of-sound approach powers the title track and Falling Apart, but for once it doesn’t feel like he’s using it to hide the human heart of it all – Glacier and the truly spectacular Gratitude crackle with tangible emotion.
The grating, wacka-wacka humour is still there in that album title and the mugging, countrified ode to coffee Ruby Quaker, but it’s not enough to sink what is an unexpectedly and unadulteratedly great album.
