Earth—one of the many places with life in Devin Townsend’s Ziltoidian Universe—contains a most precious commodity, COFFEE. As we’ve learned in ZTV Episode 1, this rare substance, unbeknownst to the fetid humans, will allow Ziltoidians to bend SPACE AND TIME. Indeeeed!
In the 2006 album Ziltoid the Omniscient(ZTO), we meet Ziltoid, an alien with major insecurities and the desire to take over Earth. We also meet Captain Spectacular, Earth’s lead commander, who defends the planet from the attack. After a series of events, Ziltoid is told by the Omnidimensional Creator that he is just a puppet, and we learn that the entire story was in the imagination of a coffee barista. Until….
Three years later Hevy Devy announced plans to produce a full blown Z2 musical with orchestra and choir. And the skullet? It was in a box waiting for the day it could be affixed to the mighty alien’s head. In 2012, Devin Townsend teased that he “may have written the heaviest thing [he’s] ever done”. And just two years after that, Ziltoid is back! And bigger than ever!
Presented in the style of an old radio play, Z2: Dark Matters packs the complexity of Deconstruction, the insanity of Alien, and the humour of Dev’s entire catalogue. Lush orchestration and an immense choir (and even the separate universal choir of about 1500 nerds, including myself) complement the scorching guitars and incredible drumming. This album packs a punch that’ll send you to Titan.
While I don’t want to reveal too much of the story, it appears that the attack on the first album was all a dream, and now Ziltoid is planning to befriend the puny Earthlings in an attempt to colonize their planet and gain control of all of the coffee to rule the universe. The twists and turns that follow keep you on the edge of your seat!
The time and effort that went into this album is evident throughout. Ziltoid Goes Home’s intricacy and Deathray’s headbanging choruses would have easily fit on Strapping Young Lad’s The New Black. Wandering Eyes would feel at home on Inifinity, and some of the riffs on Earth could have been released on Synchestra. Wandering Eye runs off of a weird shifting time signature that works well, but as a whole would have been turned sounded better a full song rather than a device to progress plot. On the plus side of things, the tapping guitar riff with Devin singing on top in Dimension Z is one of my favourite parts of the album.
The voice acting is top-notch and hammy as you would expect! It is great to hear a variation in the voices of the characters (on ZTO, Devin did all of the voices) as Chris Jericho plays Captain Spectacular and Dominique Lenore Persi plays the War Princess.
Throughout the album there are times when the story and the music clash a bit, and the story can be harder to follow than ZTO was. I would have liked to hear the lead vocals and band up a bit louder than the choir and orchestra. Earth, for example, would benefit from having more solid vocal melodies, rather than being a bit suffocated by the choir.
Clearly this album (along with Sky Blue, for which a review is on its way) is a defining moment of Devin’s career. If the recent crowd-funded project Casualties of Cool(from which excess funds were used for Z2) is any indication, our main man has an incredibly supportive and ever-growing fanbase that can laugh at a fart and boobies now and then. Z2: Dark Matters will be talked about throughout the ages as a genre-bending, sci-fi extravaganza that only other albums from Dev’s catalog parallel. It’s hard not to sing along with tasty vocal melodies of Dimension Z.
This double album will be released October 28 in Canada/USA, and October 27 in Europe. For fans of the music that may find the dialogue distracting, the three disc editions contains a version of Dark Matters without dialogue. I personally think both versions will have their merits given the listening environment. So go pre-order this now! Then when it arrives, sit back with a strong coffee—BLACK—and immerse yourself for the duration without distraction. Truly appreciate what I consider to be a masterpiece.
4.5/5
Thanks to Jon Pebsworth at Century Media and Jasper Shuurmans at Northern Music Co. for the chance to review this album.
Visit www.ziltoid.com for more insanity and ZTV episodes leading up the the release of the album!
Deathray Lyric Video
North American Pre-Order: http://www.cmdistro.com/Artist/Devin_Townsend/10266
or http://www.jsrdirect.com/bands/devintownsendproject
European Pre-Order: https://www.bandstores.co.uk/shop/devintownsend/
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