The New Banner

no, no, i've not gone commercial. yet. it's not as if i'm in that kind of "sell-out-able" position in my career.

however, i have been a fan of Devin Townsend since Steve Vai opened the world up to his pipes (or laid his pipes open to the world... or something like that) on his successful/abortive band project called, appropriately enough, Vai.

in one album and one album tour, Vai successfully encapsulated the typical metal-band lifecycle (complete with vocalist-lead guitarist clash of egoes leading to the break-up; sans reunion, however) with arguably brilliant (i mean, i think so, anyway) and a-typical metal. but i digress. now little Stevie Vai has grown-up, and has Favored Nations and his own live-tour band called The Breed, the Dev has HevyDevy Records and his own bands the Devin Townsend Band and Strapping Young Lad and gets to do his own twiddling-with-his-toys thing, and all is right in the world. all madness in its right place.

anyhoo, i've been a fan of Devin Townsend since, oh, i'd say about 1994, but it wasn't until i was in college that i really got in deep with his own stuff, Vai being, well, Vai, and not Devin Townsend.

i love everything the Mad Canadian has done. he's the metal mad scientist, crafting amazingly dense sonic landscapes that may seem like solid impregnable walls of "amps-at-eleven" sound, but turn-out to be intricate Celtic weavings of instrumentation... still impregnable, but not necessarily solid and exponentially more interesting.

incidentally, his ubermetal monster, Strapping Young Lad (SYL), inspired me to call meself by me current handle, skinnyblackcladdink (sbd). there ya go. you learn something new every, well, now and then.

These days, i'm not as much of a metalhead as i used to be, though i still bang my head to the appropriate beat. and when i do break out the metal, i make sure i do it right and pull-out all the stops with Devin Townsend's stuff.

none o' that panzy ass crap they slap together and throw on the radio these days.

geez, that all sounds faintly beer-commercialish.

so anyway, the new SYL album's out. The New Black will most likely not be available locally, of course, and i'll need to scrounge up me resources to pull a copy off the global aether, so to temporarily appease my need to connect with the music and the band, i've broken out the old DT stuff, popped a CD from the DT catalogue (i'm listening to Mr Townsend's Infinity as i type this), and, yes, pulled the banner off the official site and popped it into the code.

i'm trying it out to see if it fits. for the moment, i think i rather like it.

*

in other news.

today is Titus Groan's (the character's, not the book's) birthday, which means Jeff VanderMeer's Shriek: An Afterword is due for release in a few hours.

hurrah Titus, wherever you are.

and here's to Mr VanderMeer as well. fingers crossed we see his book on our shores.