If the first two parts of the tetralogy initiated in 2009 by Devin Townsend, "Ki" and "Addicted", have been released a few months apart, the last two have been released simultaneously, separated as a double album subtitled "Calm And The Storm". Knowing the guy, it's no coincidence. If this choice could create a kind of confusion in the public's mind, a confusion that the Canadian has always been careful to cultivate, it can be explained by the complementarity, the intimacy that unites "Deconstruction" and "Ghost". For where their two predecessors, as distant from each other as possible, did not establish any link between them, their successors seem to want to respond to each other and be inseparable. A little like Ying and Yang, white and black or day and night.
Captured before "Deconstruction", of which he presents himself as the exact opposite, "Ghost" finally succeeds him and completes this (falsely) heterogeneous ensemble, to which he confers, by his apparent calm, close to the silent character of "Ki", a cyclical form. Listening to it following in his twin brother's footsteps sounds like a deliverance, a salutary breath after the violent, even auboutist discharge of the deconstruction enterprise. In fact, compared to the latter, "Ghost" may disappoint by its false simplicity and by its melodic lines, some of which evoke those that once aired "Ocean Machine" or "Terria".
Moments of pure grace are mixed with less successful ones, even though all the tracks are adorned with an evanescent envelope that makes them elusive, almost immaterial. As the man doesn't conceive his albums as the simple addition of songs, it seems as vain as it is tedious to pretend to brush an exhaustive tour of the owner that only multiple attentive listening will be able to deflower. However, some tracks clearly stand out from the rest, even though each of them forms a link of a clearly indivisible whole, whose beautiful purity of line should not hide its complexity.
Let's mention - and in order - the aptly named "Fly", the ideal doorway and typical composition of the Canadian in quiet mode, "Feather", a long crossing whose last part fades away little by little in an Ambient veil, "Monsoon", a superb and hypnotic instrumental where Kat Epple's flute mixes with the guitar of the master of the place, "Texada", a sort of climax and the most comfortable title for the musician's regulars who will find there his genius intact for this kind of stratospheric take-off, and "Infinite Ocean", slow Ambient and nautical drift beautiful and infinite like the sound of the surf. Although some compositions are more anecdotal ("Kawaii"), all of them deserve to be lingered on because they are among those we think we know them - wrongly - very quickly, but which in reality deliver their intimacy only after multiple preliminaries.
If with his brutal counterpart, Devin had perhaps never gone so far in the expression of chaos (apart from with SYL's Heavy As A Really Heavy Thing...), he reaches with "Ghost" another kind of extreme, never having given birth to a work so far away from its metallic roots. Does this mean that the Canadian, finally freed from this catharsis-like project, is now heading in this direction? The rest of the story promises to be exciting to follow...