City, and still one of my favourites to this day!

Heavy as a really heavy thing......

And then every SYL/Dev/DTB album the day it came out!!!!!!!

City & Infinity

the first of any of his stuff was Alien (a life changer), first solo was Accelerated Evolution

First heard SYL with "Love?" back in '05 on a Metal Hammer sampler CD, and subsequently bought Alien that April. Didn't actually look into any other Dev stuff (SYL or solo) until the following year. Read up on SYL, about this Devin Townsend chap and his solo work, so I registered here to read about and get a little more info, and two or three days later I first heard his solo stuff. So that was in February 06 and the first song was "Life", and Ocean Machine was the first full album of his I heard...

The New Black, Alien followed shortly after. From solo stuff it was Ziltoid and Synchestra on same time and after that I have collected almost everything, (actually bought Synchestra and Accelerated Evolution twice 'cause I wanted specials ).

Sex & Religion

The New Black, Alien followed shortly after. From solo stuff it was Ziltoid and Synchestra on same time and after that I have collected almost everything, (actually bought Synchestra and Accelerated Evolution twice 'cause I wanted specials ).

It's a balls when you get one and then realise that there's one with more stuff. I've two copies of Ki, two Terrias, two Ziltoids, two Synchestras, and two The New Blacks.

Ziltoid

The New Black, Alien followed shortly after. From solo stuff it was Ziltoid and Synchestra on same time and after that I have collected almost everything, (actually bought Synchestra and Accelerated Evolution twice 'cause I wanted specials ).

It's a balls when you get one and then realise that there's one with more stuff. I've two copies of Ki, two Terrias, two Ziltoids, two Synchestras, and two The New Blacks.

Yeah, fortunately I got TNB right at first time. And naturally upcoming boxset is must buy when it's out...

Ocean Machine. My guitar player brought it over to my house and said he would let me borrow it. He didn't tell me what it was. Just said I should listen. I did listen. A lot.

City and my mind was infiltrated

The first time I heard anything Devin(e) was three years ago when I was fed up listening to all the music we had since it was mainly my brothers. He had mentioned that his friend listens to this band called SYL and I might like it. So I decided to give it a go and got me the Alien album.

I laughed when I listened to it for the first time. Not because I thought it was stupid or anything.
It was so surprising, berserk and demented. It caught me completely off guard. I laughed of the sheer joy the music gave to me. It was so brilliant. It was exactly what I needed.

So I thought that Alien was great, and i decided that I had to hear more stuff from "this Devin Townsend Guy". I got Ocean Machine, but I was disappointed, because I wanted something like Alien, but Ocean Machine is completely different stuff, at least to me. So I quit researching Devin's music.

Until one day, when I was all dizzy from a bad flu, "Regulator" was suddenly playing in my head and I started humming and singing(except I can't sing ) along. Then I wondered where had I even heard it from. I found the Ocean Machine album and listened it through again. It opened to me in a completely different way than before.
Then I really got into Devin's music.

Now I have all the SYL cds and Devin's main albums (from Ocean Machine to Addicted)

Awhile back, whilst in high school, I remember hearing Love? and seeing its video on Headbanger's Ball. It was easily one of the strangest things I had heard at the time, because here was this twisted sounding (those wavering bent notes in the intro...huge!) mid-tempo metal song that just had this marching groove behind it. I was hooked and had to hear more, so I bought Alien and was floored with the intensity and speed that songs had...never before had I heard anything like it. Even Info Dump creeped me out, and I'd suggest to friends that they listen to it (but none really had the attention span to make it past the first 3 minutes of minimal white noise). It was a collection of songs that would stick with me to this day.

A year-and-a-half or two later, when I was in college in Pittsburgh, I discovered a kickass local music shop with a surprisingly extensive metal section. I hadn't bought any other SYL albums or anything up until that point, but I came upon the SYL section and I thought of the hugeness of Alien. As I skimmed the SYL albums they had in stock, they had some the Dev's solo albums (Ocean Machine, Physicist, and Synchestra if I recall correctly) mixed in. I was intrigued about how SYL's frontman's solo material might sound, so I looked at the dates on the cases to find the earliest release and bought Ocean Machine. That album had a bigger impact on me than Alien...it was metal and heavy and all that good stuff, but it also had its equal share of mellow ambiance. To me, it sounded like a perfect balance. Plus, having Pittsburgh's three rivers to aid the visualization of the water-based imagery of the album was cool, too.

Terria