VADER — Revelations (review)

Album · 2002 · Death Metal

4/5 · 2017-08-08
voila_la_scorie

This album was my introduction to Vader and I acquired it only a couple of months ago. A friend recommended Vader, and as their album "De Profundis" was one of the top rated, I set my sights on that one first. However, that album is not so easy to find for a reasonable price. So, I picked another one. But that too was a little on the higher end of pricing, and so I decided to look at albums that were not expensive by any reach and choose one of those. Thus, "Revelations" became the first Vader album to settle in to my collection.

From the get go there were things I noticed and liked about the band's sound. Of course as a death metal band, Vader employs the usual speedy guitars and brutal double bass drumming along with blast beats and severely furious drumming. But I soon picked out that this was a band that didn't follow the single-note, highly complex style of death metal riffing that many bands do. Instead, Vader use a lot of barre chord riffs and chugging barre chords that make me think of BNWoHM that was first intensified through thrash metal, then darkened through Slayer, and finally brutalized in Vader. In this way, Vader's music is actually easier to latch on to because you don't need to wrap your mind around twisting, churning, torents of incendiary riffage. This is just heavy, brutal, metal. When they do use single-note riffs, they are simpler than those of many bands and again easy to follow or even learn to play!

Accompanying this aggression is the toe-nail curling voice of "Peter" Wiwczarek. The guy sounds like a mother-huge, angry biker who could scare off a grizzly bear at a barbecue. Man, if this guy were my dad, I'd sure like to hear him yelling at the school bully's dad and not me. After hearing so many death growls and guttural rumblings, hearing Peter bellow in baritone is an exciting change.

Because I love the sound of this album, it's not easy to pick any favourites, though "The Whisper" easily has gotten the most plays simply because of the spoken part in that barrel-chested voice that utters, "This is the greatest gift you received from Mother Earth. Let's play this game." Woah! What's the gift? Intelligence? Cunning? Brute force? And what's this game? I guess I should check out the lyrics, but the image these lines conjure up is pretty wicked. Word should also go to the verse part guitar riff in "The Code", which sounds like it could have come from Judas Priest's "Painkiller" album.

This first purchase of Vader's music sounded so good that I soon sought out another lower price range album, "Necropolis", and added that one to my CD shelf, too. But that's up for another review later on. At least three more Vader albums are on standby. The only thing I can say as criticism is that the style doesn't seem to evolve or progress much and I expect that after a few albums I will be satisfied. This is not a band I can see myself completing the full CD catalogue. Nevertheless, a great first impression.

A final note: looking at the tracklist above, I see that my copy ends at "Black Moses". Perhaps the other three tracks are only available on special editions?