Obscura, Septicflesh, and The Devin Townsend Project, June 28 at the Commodore

2011 marks my 25th year of going to the Commodore. My first show at this grande dame of local venues was Marillion on the Misplaced Childhood tour. It’s still a great hall, but with most metal shows happening at the less ritzy Rickshaw Theatre these days, my trips to the Commodore have become increasingly rare.

Going to a show solely to see the opening acts can be risky. I’ve been burned in the past with tour lineups getting reshuffled or smaller bands getting turned back at the border, leaving me holding a ticket for a different gig than I’d hoped to see. This gig, however, went off as planned. Seeing as the three bands opening for Children of Bodom constituted a sort of mini Progressive Nation tour, I couldn’t miss out.

A decent crowd of keeners arrived early to catch Obscura, who were the main draw for me. I’ve been digging their last two albums and their Necrophagist/Cynic/Death-style shred death. Opening with “Septuagint,” they put on a slick half-hour show. My favourite section of “Vortex Ominium” got spoiled by some guy who wanted to take my picture because I reminded him of some dude he knew. This has been happening to me a lot when I'm out by myself lately. Guess I just have one of those faces.

My friend Chris claims the seven-string guitar is “an asshole’s instrument,” but in Obscura’s skilled hands they are weapons for tech-death domination. Dedicating “Ocean Gateways” to all the real Morbid Angel fans (fans of the pre-Illud Divinum Insanus Morbid Angel, I presumed) was a nice touch, seeing as that track is pure “Where the Slime Live” worship. Like I said, this was a polished performance. I was especially impressed with how Steffen Kummerer fit most of his stage raps into the songs themselves. There was even an extended jam section at the end of the set. Of the three openers, Obscura came across as the most solid, traditional metal band. I’m a bigger fan than ever now.

I was a Septicflesh (or Septic Flesh) fan around the time of Esoptron and The Ophidian Wheel, but only caught up with their recent work with their latest, The Great Mass. Their stage setup was more elaborate than Obscura’s, with twin backdrops and some kind of alien dragonfly bauble on Spiros Antoniou’s mike stand. Their set was rousing, all right, but it didn’t quite do it for me. While the new album skilfully balances classical orchestrations and metal, in concert this translated to very prominent backing tracks to recreate the sound. As a result, Septicflesh came across as more of an act than a band. Antoniou is a bassist in the Tom Araya mold, playing the most basic parts only occasionally. (He still needed to retune after the second song!) The crowd loved them, but I got tired by the sixth exhortation to go “Hey! Hey! Hey! Hey!” as the backing track churned away.

Wow, what a transformation Devin Townsend’s undergone. His Strapping Young Lad persona could be summed up in the “buy a t-shirt and eat a dick!” sort of remarks he’d fire off at the crowd. The crotchety, skulleted DT has been replaced by a gleaming superbeing who wants only to spread joy through his music. He mugged and gurned up a storm for an adoring crowd, introducing the band as the evening’s “nerd contingent” and ordering the tough guys in the pit to “get happy, man!” I don’t have the money or free time to keep up with DT’s output—Ocean Machine, Terria, and Synchestra are enough for me to ponder for a lifetime—so the setlist was a mystery. I think he opened with something from Ziltoid. After tuning down to B mid-set, the sound turned into a horrible pudding and I couldn’t discern what was happening at all. I blame extreme downtuning as much as the iPhone for impeding my enjoyment of live music. You can still make cool music in standard tuning, you know. But whatever my preferences, it was still a triumphant display. As the crowd hailed him as the hometown hero he is, he promised he’d be back this fall.

Having seen what I paid for, I headed out before Children of Bodom. Three pro bands and a good night’s sleep for 40 bucks—not a bad deal at all.

Me, browsing the new releases.
Shrinkwrap sticker: “Limited edition with bonus DVD.”
Me: “But of course.”
Yoink!

Aren’t record companies clever these days, with their strategies to get us to buy their product? Well, they are. They’ve sure seen me coming lately.

Here are a couple recent purchases with audio/visual bonuses.

Mogwai—Mr. Beast
It comes in a nice hardbound case displaying Emily Carr grad Amanda Church’s art in its jizz-splattered glory. It's a great album—heavy metal mood music and ominous post-rock jamming in 3 1/2 to 5 1/2 minute bursts. I’ve never been disappointed by a Mogwai album, though I admit I don’t revisit them often after the new-purchase honeymoon. The bonus 40-minute DVD is a fractured document of the album’s recording whose main aim seems to be demystification. Band members take turns answering questions (What’s the worst part about being in a band? “Trying to make up music. That’s hard”), lounging around on couches playing with their laptops, and laying down tracks. Brief and underwhelming live clips interrupt the studio footage. I pride myself on being able to decipher all varieties of accented English, but I’ll admit I wished for subtitles to clarify the Scottish mumbling at certain points. This special edition was worth the extra few bucks, as it’s saved me the $25 that I’d have spent on a ticket to their upcoming gig if I hadn’t watched this DVD first.

The Devin Townsend Band—Synchestra
Having received two promo copies of this marvelous album, I felt duty-bound to buy the fanciest legitimate copy I could. This one comes with a live-in-the-studio DVD featuring the guys running through the DTB back catalogue, augmented visually with a lot of split-screen effects and what looks like the iTunes visualizer fading in and out of the picture. Low budget, for sure, but the execution is in medium-to-good taste. The studio set lasts about an hour. The sound is pristine, and the band rock out mightily, proving that Devin’s multi-layered orchestrations are very reproducible live. Drummer Ryan Van Poederooyen in particular puts on a clinic. It must have been nerve-wracking for the band to subject themselves to such an up-close, multi-camera shoot. There’s also a video for the song “Storm” off Accelerated Evolution, a Devin-guided tour around Armoury Studios (where the live set was shot), and a DTB-on-tour segment. Professional and impressive, this is well worth the extra 10 or so bucks if you’re a fan.

I finished work on the new issue of Unrestrained! last week. I still feel like I'm coming up for air, as the last few days of every issue get pretty intense. I talked to Norway's Green Carnation, Toronto's Martin Popoff, and Maple Ridge's Devin Townsend for this edition, so I'll try to post some interview leftovers in the coming weeks.

I'll start with Devin Townsend, who's just released one of his finest albums ever, Synchestra, with the Devin Townsend Band. It's a homespun yet epic record, full of surprises and nonchalant genius. He's a great guy to talk to, and I regret that I couldn't include the full scope of our conversation in my U! piece, which ended up being a sort of guided tour through the songs on the new album.

I asked Devin about the guests he had on Synchestra—guests like Steve Vai, who gave Townsend one of his first big breaks as vocalist on Vai's Sex and Religion album in 1993.

You’ve got Steve Vai playing a solo on the song "Triumph." You've mentioned before that it was sort of a renewal of your creative relationship.

"Yeah, and also closing the door on a 12-year cycle. It was 12 years ago that I did that Vai thing, which kind of launched me in some peculiar directions personally and professionally. I think I spent quite a few of those years in a combination of ruing it and blaming him. I think it took me 12 years to get past that and realize the opportunity that it actually was and realizing the friend that I’ve actually got in that guy. While a lot of people had the opportunity to go to music university to learn their craft, I had the opportunity to go to 'Steve School' and learn lots about the practical application of the music, like the touring and the management end of it and the production and obviously guitar and vocals...as far into it as videos and band dynamic and all this kind of shit. Being able to apply that to my own works has shaped me in a way that it’s hard to picture myself without [all that] at this point. So having Steve perform on a song lke 'Triumph' I think lets bygones be bygones. I mean, personally Steve and I have been fine since the second year after that, but professionally I’ve just been going down so many weird paths for so long that to get out of that cycle by having him appear on the record is really therapeutic."

Did you have any specific instructions for him on the song or did you just say "Go ahead and do your thing"?

"Yeah, the only specific instruction I had was 'Here’s the file—rock it.'"

There’s a female vocalist on the album too. Who is that?

"Well, Nick Tyzio is our sound man. He’s been our sound guy for Strapping Young Lad for a while now, and he’s a really good sound man and a really good guy. Because Synchestra has a pretty family-oriented theme to it I tried to find people who were within our circle, and Deborah is Nick’s wife. She’s got a really good voice and she’s got a lot of things that she’ll be doing in the future. She’s really talented, so it was good to be able to utilize her voice for this."