The Tivoli - Fri Mar 12

The promise of prolific noisemaker/Canadian jokester Devin Townsend is a big enough drawcard to make Brisbane’s World Of Warcraft community leave their monitors for the evening to converge upon the Tivoli. As much as Contrive front man Paul Haug tries – “Have some fun, it’s Friday” – tonight’s crowd is mercilessly stony towards the three-piece opening act. Tracks off the band’s forthcoming second album The Internal Dialogue can’t detract from the crowd’s laser-beam focus on Devin Townsend. Opening with the mammoth title track from Addicted!, the Devin Townsend Project’s firecracker frontman snarls “We’ve got two hours for ya,” to the vocal delight of The Tivoli’s crowd. Townsend and his band proceed to manoeuvre through the back catalogue of Hevy Devy as the incandescent frontman punctuates each song with more nerd humour. As he jokes about his “cheap fucking suit” and his inactive sex life, Townsend explores the progressive rock element of the Ocean Machine: Biomech album with tracks like Life and Seventh Wave and the understated beauty of last year’s Ki record with tracks like Disruptr and Ki. Whatever style the band explore, the audience appears equally enamoured of all of Townsend’s work, until he plays material from his 2007 rock opera Ziltoid The Omniscient. As the corny jokes from ZTO take over the PA, pockets of the audience recognise this to be Devin Townsend’s finest hour. Despite the amazing performance Townsend and his band put on, there’s still a gaping hole in the set list. Any hope fans in Strapping Young Lad t-shirts have of Townsend revisiting the material he wrote in his seminal cyber-thrash outfit is crushed when the Devin Townsend Project leave the stage after a soaring, up-beat rendition of Bend It Like A Bender!

TOM HERSEY

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