UMUR "SYL" is the 3rd full-length studio album by Canadian extreme metal act Strapping Young Lad. The album was released through Century Media Records in February 2003. It´s the successor to "City" from 1997 and features the same four-piece lineup who recorded the predecessor, although Strapping Young Lad had a longer hiatus between 1999 and 2002. In the intermediate years the other members of the band worked on various other musical projects, while lead vocalist/guitarist Devin Townsend recorded and released a couple of solo albums and worked as a producer for other artists too (including artists like Soilwork and Stuck Mojo). Townsend also struggled with his bipolar disorder and even admitted himself to a psychiatric hospital in early 1998. After being released and taking medication for the disorder, he was able to work again, but continued his substance abuse, which combined with his disorder made his behaviour erratic. The material for "SYL" were written using a more collaborative approach than the preceding releases, which were more or less solely written by Townsend.

Stylistically the material on the album is unmistakably the sound of Strapping Young Lad. A few more death metal influences and not as many industrial metal influences, but other than that this is Strapping Young Lad as we know and love them. It´s often pretty extreme music with thrash, groove, and death metal riffs, powerful fast-paced drumming, and Townsend screaming his lungs out with great passion and conviction. There is so much more to the music on this album than that though. Townsend as always have created a layered and larger than life sound production and has added keyboards/synths, choirs, and electronic effects to the music. His vocals are also very diverse, ranging from screaming, death metal growls, aggressive raw vocals, and melodic clean singing. Townsend is without a doubt one of the most versatile extreme metal vocalist on the scene, and while his performance here isn´t among his most varied and adventurous, he is still leagues ahead of other vocalists in the genre.

"SYL" opens with the short, powerful, and pummeling intro "Dire", before exploding and blowing the listener back in the seat with "Consequence". Strapping Young Lad surely know how to open an album with a statement of intent...and with "Relentless" and "Rape Song" it´s made abundantly clear that that intent is to beat the listener to a pulp with intense sonic violence. "SYL" is in many ways an incredibly extreme album, but the pace is lowered a couple of times during the playing time and tracks like "Aftermath" and "Force Fed" are a little more accessible and mid-paced heavy. Album closer "Bring On the Young" is a slow building, repetitive, and at its climax almost symphonic track.

"SYL" is probably the most stylistically consistent album by Strapping Young Lad. While still unconventional and adventurous, it´s not quite as diverse as the other albums by the band. It´s an angry album, focused a lot on aggression and brutality and it´s certainly Strapping Young Lad at their most dark and heavy. If that´s a good or a bad thing I´ll leave up to the reader to decide, but I personally rank both "City (1996)" and "Alien (2005)" higher and perceive them as more accomplished releases (the two albums bookending "SYL"). "SYL" is still a high quality release though, and as anything else released by Strapping Young Lad, it´s completely unique and doesn´t really sound like anything else on the scene. A 4 star (80%) rating is deserved.

SilentScream213 The sophomore album by Strapping Young Lad is a much more concise piece of music with a clear direction. There were many aspects I liked about this album: - The rhythm section is fantastic. Drums are energetic and aggressive just as I prefer. - Production is pristine. Every instrument is audible and some interesting Industrial sound effects add layers to the compositions. - Devin’s voice is awesome. His range is incredible, usually hitting somewhere between melodic singing and screaming, but going every which way up and down that spectrum, and doing it all very well.

Unfortunately, this album has a lot of weakness that really stifle the enjoyment for me. - The riffs are boring. They are mostly rhythmic, with very little lead guitarwork and nothing at all memorable being crafted with the guitars. - The lyrics are mostly bad, with too much unnecessary vulgarity that just doesn’t work. - Devin adopts a “tough guy” persona on the album and whether it’s a joke or not doesn’t matter, it’s really annoying and really cringy. - Devin is known for being a musical chameleon, but this album is (among his work) quite samey front to back, with most songs being Thrashy/Groovy Industrial Metal. That wouldn’t be a problem, but they all suffer from the same exact weaknesses, which makes the samey-ness that much more offensive.

That leaves this album a really mixed bag for me. It’s a good album, but it has way more potential than it ever reaches, and too many weaknesses that hold it back.

UMUR "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing" is the debut full-length studio album by Canadian metal act Strapping Young Lad. The album was released through Century Media Records in April 1995. Band founder Devin Townsend formed Strapping Young Lad after having recorded and toured with Steve Vai and subsequently toured with The Wildhearts before getting tired of and angry with the music business. He often felt like he was seen as a product rather than an artist, and he began to resent that. He needed a place to let out some steam and as he had been blown away by Fear Factory´s aggressive, industrial oriented, and heavy technical take on extreme metal, Townsend felt that he had the right ingredients to make something aggressive and unique, by combining the heavy, sharp, and aggressive extreme metal influences from artists like Fear Factory, Machine Head, and Sepultura, with the industrial sounds of artists like Ministry, Skinny Puppy, Nine Inch Nails, and Marilyn Manson.

The 2006 Century Media Records ressue of "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing" includes a 12-page booklet with extended liner notes by Townsend where he recalls the troubles he had getting a record contract. I found one anekdote particularly entertaining. After Townsend had spend a lot of time recording and sending demos and going to business dinners with Roadrunner Records, his project was rejected by the label. He promtly responded by sending Monte Conner from Roadrunner Records a package full of rocks and a picture of his asshole. Townsend had originally promised Monte Conner that the project he had been working sounded like Type O Negative (who were one of the most successful contemporary artists on the label). The picture of Townsend´s asshole is of course a reference to Peter Steele from Type O Negative flashing his asshole on the original cover artwork for the "The Origin of the Feces" live album. A reference Monte Conner must have picked up immedately. That is some great dark humour in my book. Fully displaying the madman genius of Townsend.

Stylistically it´s pretty hard to explain how the music sounds, but hard edged thrashy/groove thrashy chugging riffing, loads of samples, effects, and sounds, and some often manic sounding vocals are some of the ingredients on this album. The trademark Townsend wall of sound production is very present already on this early discography album. Headphones is a good idea if you want to experience this album and get the most out of it. The tracks feature so many different layers of guitars, synths, effects, vocals, and samples, that as a listener it often feels like you´re being sonically assaulted and your ears are abused. In that respect "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing" isn´t the most dynamic release out there. But it´s by no means a one-dimensional release either, and Townsend often surprise the listener with for example a melodic part or something else which breaks the furiously energetic and intense core sound of the album.

The quality of the material is a bit up and down and sometimes the tracks sound a bit too much like experiments/sketches of songs and not enough like fully realised compositions. On the other hand those are some very interesting experiments and that counts for something too. The two tracks which open the album titled "S.Y.L." and "In the Rainy Season" are probably the songs on the album which remind me the most of later material by the band. The former is an absolutely brilliant track. The 2006 Century Media reissue of the album includes 4 bonus tracks and the video clip for "S.Y.L.". None of the bonus tracks add much value to the album if you ask me. The cover of the Judas priest song "Exciter" is not among Strapping Young Lad´s finest moments that´s for sure.

"Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing" walks the fine line between madness and genius, crazy noise and brilliant compositions. It´s a very difficult album and it won´t please everyone. All of Strapping Young Lad´s albums have a distinct direction and unique sound, but "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing" is probably the one which stands out the most, because it´s vastly different from the rest. For better and worse. A 3 - 3.5 star (65%) rating is warranted.

UMUR "City" is the 2nd full-length studio album by Canadian industrial extreme metal act Strapping Young Lad. The album was released through Century Media Records in February 1997. It´s the successor to "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing" from 1995. An album which was essentially a solo album by lead vocalist/guitarist Devin Townsend, featuring some contributions from session musicians. After the release of "Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing (1995)", Townsend temporarily moved to Los Angeles, where he wrote the material for "City". Before entering the studio Townsend assembled a permanent lineup, thus making Strapping Young Lad a band instead of a solo project. New in the lineup are guitarist Jed Simon and bassist Byron Stroud, who Townsend had worked with before, and to complete the lineup he recruited drummer Gene Hoglan, known at that point for his work with Dark Angel and Death.

"Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing (1995)" was an erratic and experimental industrial metal album, which featured moments of absolute brilliance, but it was ultimately a bit too inconsistent in style and quality to reach the sky in terms of high ratings (my subjective opinion). "City" is in many ways a completely different beast. Townsend and Co. have created a more clearly defined extreme metal sound although the music retains some of the debut´s dark scizophrenic approach. The industrial elements are toned down a bit (which doesn´t mean they are gone) in favor of a more aggressive guitar driven sound, which takes its cues from both death- and thrash/groove metal. Townsend have in many interviews stated that he was strongly influenced by Fear Factory in those days, and while Strapping Young Lad has a very different (less accessible and generally more extreme) sound to that band, there are audible similarities and the influence is definitely heard more than once during the playing time.

"City" is the kind of album which opens by sending a jackhammer to the face of the listener. From the opening intro track "Velvet Kevorkian" until the sixth track "AAA", where things finally slow down and become a little more melodic and mid-paced, the listener is bombarded with a wall of sound and alien atmospheres. Sometimes the riffs and rhythms move at a frantic pace, while the vocals by Townsend are completely schizophrenic changing from ultra aggressive shouting/screaming, to melodic singing, to unintelligible almost cartoonish babbling. Everything of course delivered with ease and great skill by Townsend. "Oh My Fucking God" is probably the prime example of Strapping Young Lad, when they are most extreme. "All Hail the New Flesh" and "Detox" at least feature some handles to hold on to, while still being incredibly energetic and intense tracks.

As mentioned "AAA" is a heavier, mid-paced track, which is a breather after the album opens in such an intense fashion, and actually after "AAA", "City" changes character a little bit and becomes more varied. "Room 429" is another heavy and more melodic track, while album closer "Spirituality" features an almost dreamy ethereal atmosphere. It´s a track which wouldn´t have felt wrong on one of Townsend´s solo albums. So "City" is most definitely an eclectic size and its frontloaded aggression and craziness doesn´t continue throughout, which is a clever move from the band, as it would probably have lessened the impact of the high energy aggressive tracks on the album. Aggression and brutality are almost always most effective when delivered in doses.

"City" features a detailed, powerful, and futuristic sounding production job, which suits the material perfectly. It´s just one of the features of the album which have been improved upon since the debut album. The idea to assemble a permanent lineup of skilled musicians is another and "City" just reeks class and skill in every department. This is not only a unique sounding release, it´s also a very well crafted one. A 5 star (100%) rating is deserved.

voila_la_scorie Around the end of 2014, I became a very devoted fan of Devin Townsend. While his solo projects and Devin Townsend Band and Devin Townsend Project were what attracted me to his music at first, I absolutely had to have the five Strapping Young Lad albums as well.

This third album in the catalogue was released several years after the highly popular City album. For many fans of the band, City was Strapping Young Lad. The debut was just a warm up. But during the intervening years between City and this self-titled third album, Devin was exploring other styles of muscial self-expression. Naturally, when a new SYL album was announced, fans were eagerly awaiting the release. Many, however, were disappointed as it was not a City II.

While City featured an unbridled aggression, waving a big middle finger at the music industry because of Devin's frustrations with it at the time, Strapping Young Lad was a little more polished, bearing some of the trademarks of Devin's other work. Nevertheless, Devin knew what fans were expecting and many of the songs are brutal auditory assaults with Gene Holgan's pummeling double bass complementing the explosive guitar and Devin's flesh-shredding screaming. The disappointment factor for me is that many of the tracks seem to have been written and recorded with that sole purpose in mind: to be loud and brutal. Of course Devin is an individual of deep thought and sensitive as well, so I have no doubt that there was great thought put into the lyrics. "Rape Song" was intended to express rage against a rapist but was misunderstood by some as condoning rape. Poor Devin had to clear that one up.

There are moments where I feel the brutality and the actual music (the chords, the drumming, the vocal work) do come together to create memorable songs, or at least songs I want to listen again from time to time. My two favourites are "Devour" and "Force Fed", the former a short screamer with a great gang-chanting chorus and the latter bridging both the older SYL and the future sound yet to come.

Of the five SYL albums, this one ranks number four with me. It's good but doesn't have the youthful rage of City nor the intentional rage of Alien, and also doesn't have the variety or daring humour of The New Black. Three stars for being one of the less creative, less intriguing products of Devin Townsend but still good enough to smash skulls.