City

The first Strapping Young Lad record, Heavy as a Really Heavy Thing, was effectively Devin Townsend alone. For this one he put a permanent line-up together: Jed Simon on guitar, Byron Stroud on bass and Gene Hoglan on drums. Townsend had gone to Britain to work with the Wildhearts, then returned to Vancouver and took a job in a restaurant. He moved to Los Angeles after that, slept on friends' couches and wrote both Ocean Machine and this album there. The city itself is the subject, and he has named two other strong influences: the 1980s Japanese animated series Dirty Pair and Yukito Kishiro's manga Battle Angel Alita. Kerrang! said it sounded like sticking your head into the jet nozzle of a Stealth bomber. Metal Hammer ranked it thirteenth in its top twenty albums of 1997; Terrorizer listed it among the 100 Most Important Albums of the Nineties in 2000, and its readers placed it thirtieth in the hundred best of the decade. In 2002 Revolver put it at number 45 in its 69 Greatest Metal Albums of All Time. A remastered reissue in 2007 added unreleased tracks and the video for "Detox". The running order here is the original's as printed.