Phonebook Eater
8/10
"Black Future" is a toxic, fast, and catchy beast that emits a cheerfully dystopian light.
Vektor are an American Thrash Metal band: “Black Future” is their third studio length LP. By most of the Thrash community highly praised, this band is unique thanks to their spacey themes and peculiar, Black Metal influenced vocals. “Black Future” is, so far, the album that most faithfully and best represents their attitude and philosophy, becoming one of the best Thrash Metal albums this reviewer has ever heard in recent years.
The thing that you first notice in this colossal album is the clean production, a characteristic that doesn’t usually suit neither Thrash nor Black Metal: but here, it does nothing but compliment the music. The guitars are edgy and loud, the vocals have been mentioned for the most part, except for the fact that they are very varied and different sounding every time; sometimes they’re more like ghostly screams, other times they are raspy and lower pitched. Then the rhythms are pretty standard for the genre, but they are constantly changing, giving a pretty strong technical feel to the compositions. With these characteristics, Vektor play around with some progressive-like structures and mix in some slower, usually guitar driven passages, as well as some futuristic-machinery sound effects.
In most of the lyrics, there is an evident science fiction/dystopian theme, usually of something that has or is dominating earth, physically or psychologically: whether it be nuclear explosions, asteroids, dark nebulas, or genetically modified creatures. Exceptions include “Forests Of Legend”, the narrating of a once fantastic forest, where Giants and massive creatures lived. Anyhow, there’s almost always a sort of changed-as-we-know-it end of our world.
Over an hour long, “Black Future” never manages to bore or to exasperate the listener: the songs are elaborate and complex but not hard to follow. The pillars of the album are definitely the songs that pass the ten minute border: “Forests Of Legend”, “Dark Nebula” and “Accelerating Universe”. Within these ten minutes Vektor bring chaos to earth, as if zombies just came out of a spaceship and are running around,destroying everything they see; they also manage to give some calmer, slower moments within them, making them even more interesting. The remaining six songs however are not less effective: “Asteroid” is fast, catchy, and technical, just like the more Black Metal influenced title track, or “Oblivion”.
An album like no other, “Black Future” is sure the LP that should stick in the minds of Thrash Metal fans for quite some time. This is a great alternative to bands like Metallica and Megadeth; Vektor are a band that perhaps should be learned more of, even by the people who don’t care about Thrash.