Style: Progressive metal, atmospheric metal, strange experiments
Primary Emotions/Themes: Nonsense, playfulness
Thoughts: Truth - the first track off of Infinity - starts up exactly where Biomech left off. Massive riffs, huge sense of atmosphere, delay and reverb coming out of every pore, and a larger than life presence. It's a short instrumental that lures me in quickly and holds my attention. It leads directly into Christeen which is upbeat and almost poppy in the way it bounces around the room. Heavy metal pop, is that a thing? I think Devy used that term for Epicloud or Addicted when they first came out. Either way it's a thing here too.
This is all well and good, so he made a follow up to Ocean Machine and is content to sit on his laurels. That's fine, Biomech is a fine album and a part 2 wouldn't be a bad thing. This is what I would say if the next song wasn't Bad Devil.
This is where Infinity starts to show what it's all about. Bad Devil is the third track and its... completely bonkers. The main riff alters between a pipe organ and a stupidly heavy riff that sounds like it belongs more in a polka song than anything resembling metal. The fact that we get a horn solo in the middle of it only furthers the polka comparison. What some may call a playful song others would call bat shit crazy. It's like Devy took the insanity of Strapping Young Lad, replaced the aggression with humor and Frankensteined it together in a way that should never work. But it does.
That's the essence of Infinity in a nutshell. The music is playful, it's chaotic, it's unpredictable, and it's fantastic. Not every experiment works, but it doesn't need to. The whole idea of the album is to do things that haven't been done before. When they work, they work exceptionally well. When they don't... well we just move on.
Infinity is not an album that is content to be stagnant at all. There are many genres here, almost as many as there are songs. It feels like Devy had a ton of ideas and just vomited them all out at once into a singular album. It's varied quality as it is in the genres represented. It's far from my favorite Devin album, but it has a certain mystique to it that none of his other work has. It's fun to put on the turntable for a night and let the insanity wash me away.
Written February 5th 2024
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