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Devin Townsend: The hummer
10/10/07 || The Duff
Just to get this one straight and out of the way, this CD isn’t about blowjobs. This is Devin’s take on Ulver circa electronica-era music; considering this style of music is relatively new terrain for the man, I put my issues with “Ziltoid the Omniscient” aside and ordered a copy of “The Hummer”, thinking that I had little to lose. Dev (we are indeed buds, tighter than Nureyev’s tights to his package) stated that this wasn’t for everyone, being very minimal and requiring a good set of headphones, but I figured that I really dig the hell out of recent Ulver, and so wasn’t likely to show an aversion to this.
“The Hummer” is, despite its being six tracks and seventy minutes of music, a real easy listen. It comprises very soothing noises, yet somehow never treads into “soundscape” territory. It all retains a very dreamy vibe, even with Leonard Cohen spouting some philosophical speech about life, bees and the “Tera Patrick Pocket Pussy 2000” or some such (as well as a couple of other monologues), doubtlessly there to fulfill Dev’s nerdy-cravings (checking out the album cover, the tracklisting and acknowledging the album length would make even prog fans label this somewhat pretentious). But hey, that’s what we’re here for when it comes to atmospheric shit.
Dev is certainly good at producing this stuff in small handfuls on his full-lengths, but when devoting 100% of his creative output to such a style, you’re probably better off searching some place else for what “The Hummer” is a little hot and cold in delivering. Still, this album has its charms, and I wouldn’t have bothered with such a variety of ambient music any other way (my pure adoration for all things Devy led me down this path).
This scores an eight because I haven’t heard anything like it before, and therefore am not really the best judge when it comes to this sort of music. I am willing to wager you can find better music of this ilk out there, but then this can’t be the easiest stuff to fuck up, and so I reckon an eight is pretty average for what it is. Finally, as repetitive as some of this album can get, none of it is boring, and it all flows very successfully despite the variety of noises it contains, which is still some feat.
Good if I don’t have anything to listen to, but don’t want silence either, and for the times when I want to dose off in as little time as possible.
8 fairly pleasant new experiences out of 10.
- Information
- Released: 2006
- Label: Hevy Devy Records
- Website: www.hevydevy.com
- Band
- Devin Townsend: mostly everything
- Jeff Feinstein: flute
- Tracklist
- 01. The Hummer
- 02. Arc
- 03. Consciousness Causes Collapse
- 04. Equation
- 05. The Abacus
- 06. Cosmic Surf
