This solo quasi-acoustic tour is an opportunity for fans to get up close to Devin Townsend and for Townsend to strip away the layers and present his songs in their most essential form. It turns out that dialling down the zaniness and lowering the volume is one of the best things Townsend could have done for his music: none of the quirks disappear, the songs remain unique, rich and sophisticated, but in this guise they find a straighter line to the listener's heart.
Devy is in storyteller mode. The setlist navigates his catalogue like a map of his mind. And, like every map, it's bipolar. His music has always reflected that duality: heavy and melodic, aggressive and tender, meticulously structured yet somehow all over the place. Only in recent years does he seem to have reconciled some of those musical and personal contradictions.
Perhaps that's why Townsend sees this tour as the end of a cycle that stretches back across his entire career. The show is introspective and confessional, looking inward while projecting out into the world. He tackles topics like mental health head-on, becomes a full-on raconteur between songs and, alone onstage with almost no artifice, lets the music speak in its simplest form.
From where we're standing, though, it feels less like an ending than a new beginning. The seeds are planted, at the very least.
SETLIST:
