Now that Canadian hard rock gadfly DEVIN TOWNSEND has laid his many projects (STRAPPING YOUNG LAD, ZILTOID THE OMNISCENT, etc.) to rest, he can worry less about which tune fits which sobriquet and just thrown everything he likes onto one album. Ki has a little of everything for which Townsend is famous: stone-melting metal (“Gato,” “Disruptr”), atmospheric art rock (“Winter,” “Terminal”), sheer weirdness (the title track), wacky humor (throughout, if often buried) and, of course, tracks that mix everything together (“Heaven Send”). The parade of self-indulgence sometimes wanders off the rez (during the long, meandering “Trainfire,” I had the urge to yell out, “Devin! Come back to us!”), but Townsend’s always been one of the more imaginative denizens of the metal underground, and putting out albums consistently under his own name lets his every creative demon out to play. Which ain’t a bad thing, frankly.
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