Vader - Necropolis 4/5

01. Devilizer 3:20 02. Rise Of The Undead 3:53 03. Never Say My Name 2:03 04. Blast 1:51 05. The Seal 2:11 06. Dark Heart 3:00 07. Impure 3:41 08. Summoning The Futura 1:06 09. Anger 2:14 10. We Are The Horde 3:11 11. When The Sun Drowns In Dark 4:33

Vader are back. It’s been three long years since we last heard any new material from the Polish masters of death, and during that period the band has undergone some changes. While everything as always revolves around guitarist/vocalist Piotr Wiwczarek, he’s brought in new faces on drums, rhythm guitar and bass, with Vader’s casualty list of previous members now well into double figures. Perhaps that’s why all we’ve heard from the band lately has been re-issues and compilations; last year alone saw a 25th-anniversary compilation album and the Lead Us!!! EP, which really whet the appetite for new material by revisiting the timeless Art Of War EP. Well, this month, at long last, Vader are sending some brand-new tunes our way.

Necropolis is everything you would expect from a Vader album. Fast, technically proficient, and so heavy it practically exerts its own form of gravity, it features the by now familiar combination of grinding death metal riffage paired with drumming frankly frightening in its pace and precision. New drummer Pawel Jaroszewicz has obviously been studying Vader’s back catalogue, as you would barely know it was a different guy hammering out the double-bass behind the kit. The guitars and bass too beat a familiar path, so don’t be expecting a meteoric change in musical style along with the lineup. In fact, Piotr recorded everything save the drums himself, and so little has really changed, musically; its all still thundering, downtuned riffs, heavy bass, and the odd tortured guitar solo. Piotr’s vocals are as always as raspy and guttural as anything in metal, and yet are still understandable - somehow, the Pole makes a lot more sense than many death metal singers who have spoken English all their lives.

Another new face is Producer Tue Madsen, who has done an excellent job of keeping everything crisp and distinctive, no mean feat considering the sheer pace at which everything moves in a Vader album. The drums in particular sound fantastic; you can really feel every individual beat, all 200-odd per minute of them. Total emphasis is given to the heavy, low-down bass tones, as is obvious enough - there isn’t really much treble in Vader’s music to work with - but with that said, the meandering, wailing guitar solos slot into the mix perfectly. Piotr himself has admitted that Vader are a very difficult band to produce (and would know, having taken a crack at himself several times in the past), but with Madsen he may have finally found the man for the job.

Track-wise, Necropolis offers up nine slabs of brand-new death metal excellence, done the way only Vader know how. I say nine as two of the album’s eleven tracks, ‘The Seal’ and ‘Summoning the Futura’, are little dark atmospheric numbers, serving both as an introduction to the following track and as a much needed breather. They break up the album a bit, which is good both musically and medically, as you’d be risking some kind of major haemorrhage if you attempted to headbang your way through the full album. ‘Summoning the Futura’ in particular is an odd one, being almost entirely a spoken-word piece by Piotr, offering a prayer to some malign devil-god.

For me, however, Necropolis waits until the final track to truly excel. ‘When The Sun Drowns In The Dark’ not only has a cracking name, it features the album’s only really memorable guitar lead, as if it took Piotr the previous 25 minutes to work out that guitar solos can comprise more than just mindless widdling and enormous bends. At times, he can take his dedication to that Kerry King style too far. Here, the pace drops a little and there are hints of melody, in what seems like a more carefully-crafted number after the breakneck insanity beforehand. It’s a great way to go out, and leaves you wanting to go back and listen to it all again. ‘When The Sun…’ rounds the album proper off just about bang on the half-hour mark (if you ignore the usual couple of minutes of silence which are tagged on the end to make the Bonus tracks seem like more of a surprise…they’re written on the back of the box, I doubt anyone’s going to have a coronary), and the classic less-is-more approach really pays off here. Necropolis is over just as quickly and violently as it starts, and leaves you wanting more; you’ll cheerfully listen through it twice in a single sitting, whereas if it were simply twice the length you might be bored long before the end.

The album contains two bonus tracks, both really very good covers; Venom’s ‘Black Metal’ and Metallica’s ‘Fight Fire With Fire’, the latter of which could almost have been written for Vader. Vader have a unique knack for making covers seem like their own song, yet without doing anything radical at all to alter them. They supply an edge of aggression that neither Venom nor Metallica could muster in their originals, and perhaps this is the thing which sets Vader aside from their peers in the death metal scene. While the majority of newer bands on the death scene succumb to churning out a predictable soup of blastbeats and shouting, inevitably ending up describing themselves as inhabiting a genre ending in “-core”, Vader are a different proposition. They always manage to offer up pure, unbridled aggression, with a depth of feeling that is absent in so many others, and I salute them for it.

Necropolis is available to buy or download at play.com

Genre : Death metal

Article by Phil Sim