Review Summary: A failed lab experiment that would've best been kept locked away.
Devin Townsend is no stranger to experimentation. Across his numerous side projects and bands he's featured in spanning multiple genres from the likes of progressive metal to ambient to country, it really feels like the man has done it all. In the case of ambient music, Devin has certainly not been a stranger to experimenting with the genre, whether it's including ambiance in a song's atmosphere as a complimentary element, having it as interludes between songs or even making full albums of nothing but ambient music. But when you're someone known to be open to experimentation, you're bound to have a few failures along the way.
Devlab just happens to be one of those failures.
Devlab was Devin's first step into pure ambient music, with his next album also being a full ambient album,
The Hummer. While
The Hummer's mood is more meditative and calm,
Devlab is dark and suspenseful, a yin to the yang if you will. However, you probably wouldn't get that feeling right away with this album. How so? Well, it just so happens the album opens up with not a dark ambient song at all, but instead it opens with... a song about hot melt glue guns. Yes, right away the listener is familiarized with Devin's sense of humor with a throwaway track that clashes with the rest of the album's atmosphere. It's only after this, well, whatever this is finishes that
Devlab finally gets into the dark ambient territory that it probably should have started with in the first place.
Thankfully, if Devin knows how to do anything right, it's setting an atmosphere, and
Devlab certainly tries to do that; of course, the keyword there is
tries to. There's several low, droning noises with little to no variation, and this continues on for the majority of the album. There's hardly anything to keep the listener engaged here, and with how little it changes, most of the album just fades into the background. I get what Devin was trying to go for here, but with
Devlab it isn't nearly as effective.
Devlab attempts to aim for a more suspenseful atmosphere compared to its sister album
The Hummer, but falls severely short. It doesn't feel suspenseful; if anything, it feels lackluster. I don't feel tense or anything along those lines from an album in a style like this. Instead... I just feel
bored. The album's runtime doesn't really do it any favors either, with it being a little over an hour long, and for an album that barely changes over that runtime, it's really detrimental to the quality of it.
It's no secret that Devin has experimented plenty of times throughout his extensive discography, but
Devlab feels like just that: an experiment, and a failed one at that. It doesn't even seem like an album that was meant to be released really, rather it just feels like a collection of musical ideas that was accidentally put together as an album. Devin has thankfully had better ventures with the ambient style of music later on in his career, so I'd personally recommend skipping
Devlab as it's not one of his brightest moments. Unless if you're into songs about hot glue guns.
