The Horror and the Wild — Album Review
The Amazing Devil takes us on a tempestuous exploration of our relationships with ourselves and others.
Music has long been one of the pillars of who I am as a person. From my varying tastes, to my heritage, to the way music helped me process trauma and isolation, I’ve always turned to this specific medium for guidance, peace, and inspiration, and I’m always greedy for more. That’s why I did not hesitate to investigate The Amazing Devil after someone on TikTok (of all places) mentioned that Joey Batey — the actor playing the role of Jaskier in Netflix’s The Witcher show adaptation — was one of two lead vocalists in a band. With “Toss a Coin to Your Witcher” being the absolute slapper that it is, thanks in large part to the charisma of Batey’s voice, surely an album featuring him would be equally excellent?
That’d be an understatement.
While other albums exist — namely Ruin, their newest, which is also excellent— I wanted to go earlier and focus on The Horror and the Wild, their 2020 release. The overall fantastical tone of the album sings to the fantasy nerd in me, but it wouldn’t be enough to just catch my attention. No, no, they had to take a hatchet to my chest and make me feel things too, the bastards.
The nine track album mixes witty wordplay and layered lyrics to fabricate a fantastical exploration of those things that make us human: love, loss, and the struggles that take place in between. The stories told in each track detail a brutally honest yet artfully presented account of intensely human experiences ranging from the desperate desire to help an ailing partner, to the loss of a parental figure, to the simple, pure comfort that comes with deep love borne of effort and time. All of this is done by mixing, matching, and blending the beautifully compatible voices of the Joey Batey and Madeleine Hyland. While I won’t go song by song in this, I do want to discuss a few personal highlights:
The Rockrose and the Thistle
The opening track, “The Rockrose and the Thistle” is an understated spoken word piece whose story is unforgivingly clear to those of us who have experienced it — from either perspective. There are two characters in this story: the bereaved partner, trying to hold themselves together, and the desperate partner that wants to bring them peace, but doesn’t know how. It’s simplicity and almost entirely a-musical presentation is a cold opener to an album that won’t pull punches. It starts the album by underlining the demons that’ll play a role in future stories while also introducing new listeners to the heavily metaphorical — yet plainly straightforward — lyrical storytelling style.
The Horror and the Wild
“The Horror and the Wild,” the album’s title track, follows “The Rockrose and the Thistle” and immediately tries to bury it. The sweeping, pounding arrangement brings the image of dark woods, a chase, and a feeling of defiance that sweeps the listener away. It’s the most metaphorical and fantastical of the stories told in the album, with room for many different interpretations. It’s also my favorite off the album by a significant margin. I won’t go into my interpretation of the piece, because I think that exploration is one that is rewarding in itself. Hyland and Batey’s voices layer against each other in both stirring duet and haunting call-and-answer over the course of the song, combining to create a song that feels both fantastical and uniquely intimate.
(Any English teachers looking for a break from old classics or poetry as fodder for literature analysis, this would be a good song to analyze.)
Welly Boots
“Welly Boots” is grounded, intimate, and personal. Told from the perspective of a parent, it explores the desire to protect and support their child — even after the parent has passed on. There’s this sense of being an unwilling spectator that desperately wants to be a participant; a feeling of bittersweet pride, hope, and tragic separation — a rift that cannot be bridged. This mixture of pride and grief is further supported by a musical arrangement that builds and loops its way into the conclusion, leaving us with the lyrical bridge pounding in our head so loudly that we cannot help but hope and believe it ourselves as the final outro verse plays out. I did cry, and I will not apologize for it.
Farewell Wanderlust
The final song I want to highlight (though I could write up something for all of them) is “Farewell Wanderlust”. While the previous tracks have focused on our relationships with others, “Farewell Wanderlust” is a bitter and driving confrontation with ourselves and our demons. Hyland leads the song’s opening with a description of that desperate feeling of trying, failing, and the regrets that follow. Batey leads the second set of verses, taking that feeling of regret and bitterness and channeling it into a hostile, combative, liberating radical acceptance of the self that spits in the teeth of the demons and God himself. “Farewell Wanderlust” is a song about looking in the mirror and coming to grips with what you see.
“So long to the person you begged me to be
He’s down, he’s dead
Now take a good long look at what you’ve done to me”
This album does not have a single track that lags behind the others. “Marbles” and “Fair” have brought me to heartfelt tears. “That Unwanted Animal” calls to that darker truth inside us we all have, but may not want to recognize. “Wild Blue Yonder” is a break from the fantastical and a return to the unadulterated mundane experience of love — as mundane as such a thing can be. “Battle Cries” ends the album with the same defiance that defined many of its peers. While I don’t know if I can say there’s something here for truly everyone, I do thing truly everyone should give this album a listen. Even if we should put aside the truths and deeper meanings here, it’s a musical masterpiece that feels like a love letter to folk music and the theatre simultaneously.
To someone like me, who has struggled with mental illness, the loss of a loved family member, and has a natural inclination toward the tragic and melancholic, this album does more than prop up a mirror — it stands in front of me and says “we see you”. The catharsis that comes with their sound is one that is as warm as the sun caressing the mountains of the Pacific Northwest at sunset, yet as bitter as the hot, stinging tears that come with growth. It’s an album, and a sound, that feels like it was intensely personal to the writers. It feels like music from the heart and soul as well as the head, and it feels like music written with little to no care for popular appeal — no matter how much it deserves it. It is proof that storytelling in song has as much range and depth as any movie, and is something people need to explore.
And I find it wonderful.
You can buy the album here: https://theamazingdevil.bandcamp.com/album/the-horror-and-the-wild
