Devin Townsend Project – Ghost Review

Devin Townsend Project // Ghost
Label: InsideOut
Websites: hevydevy.com
Release Dates: EU: 2011.06.20 | US: 06.21.2011
By:Natalie Zed

DT - GhostIt’s impossible and incorrect to review Ghost or Deconstruction as entirely antonymous albums. Even if they were released years apart, they exist in the same milieu as the other Devin Townsend Project releases, Ki and Addicted. But being released on the same day, these works are more than just musical siblings; they are twins and therefore share a deeper accord, recontextualizing each other. Ghost is definitely the lunar half. While Deconstruction is all white-hot, blistering intensity, bright and complicated, demented and noisy, and as over-caffeinated as the hottest day of the year at a carnival, Ghost is a deserted beach at twilight. Rather than a roiling explosion of energy, Ghost is careful and measured, gathering strength. It’s sweet, dark and deceptively strong. There is something about the pronounced plucking of the strings on “Heart Baby” that breaks me. This is an album that gently but inexorably gets around your defences and demands you listen to the last few, soft, unscarred parts of your heart. There are also numbers that ebb and flow, swelling into immense crescendos, like “Dark Matters” and “Texada” (which also happens to feature some of the loveliest flute playing I’ve heard on a metal album, courtesy of Kat Epple). Sometimes the emotion is as cute and pert as a sparrow, other times it’s as overwhelming and crashing as a tidal wave, but it always comes through as genuine and that’s the key to this album’s success. Where Deconstruction is a tribute to the shambling, noisy, mechanical monster or the urban, man-made world, Ghost is everything wet and green, alive and vibrant, the elemental strength and delicacy of the natural world.

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