Fuck Brumpxit its the 2016 Metal and Hard N' Heavy Rock Poll Results Thread (With spotify and bandcamp links)

mark s seal of approval makes the difference

oh this is the 1000000 year long album cs wanted me to listen to. never got around to it

if it helps u can pretend the boring 3rd disc does not exist

that's many peoples fave disc

Ah, now I'm remembering some of the things that stood out about this Jute Gyte, especially the strong sense of groove and formal variety. Great bassline in "At the Limit of Fertile Land".

I liked Schammasch well enough on my one listen to throw it a vote.

8 Deathspell Omega - The Synarchy of Molten Bones 558 Points, 16 Votes, One #1
http://i.imgur.com/BeD8ii0.jpg
https://deathspellomega.bandcamp.com/album/the-synarchy-of-molten-bones

http://www.nocleansinging.com/2016/10/31/immediate-and-completely-needless-reactions-to-deathspell-omegas-new-album-the-synarchy-of-molten-bones/

As I rapidly reported a few hours ago after receiving a Bandcamp alert, Deathspell Omega jumped the gun on their previously announced November 8 release date for their new album and uncaged The Synarchy of Molten Bones on Samhein night, to the surprise and glee of hordes of costumed and un-costumed fans.

Everyone can listen to it now; vast numbers undoubtedly already have. There is probably no need for myself or anyone else to review it. But I’m sharing some thoughts anyway, because I’ve so eagerly anticipated its release and am now near-bursting with thoughts. Better to get them out than risk an aneurism. Plus, I thought some of you might want to share your own reactions in the Comments.

Upon finishing a first listen (and my only listen as I write this), I was — to quote the title of the second song — famished for breath. Every track is so breathtakingly energetic and so flooded with mind-bending intricacy that hearing them straight through risks completely overloading the capacity of the normal human brain to keep pace, or to manage even a modicum of comprehension. I thought my brain had been unceremoniously teleported into the clutches of a centrifuge that had developed a mind of its own — and then immediately lost its mind.

That summation may be a slight exaggeration — it’s not a completely unceremonious plunge into a head-whipping spin: The album does begin (and end) with a spectral fanfare of symphonic horns. But otherwise, you may need a supplemental oxygen supply handy before pressing play. The album knows only two speeds — wildly careening, and flying like a rocket-assisted horde of bats.

It’s an intense, disorienting experience. In recent years, this kind of exuberant, head-spinning intricacy, kaleidoscopic explosiveness, and astonishing technical mastery would have brought to mind the kind of progressive and experimental death metal exemplified by the likes of Gorguts and Dysrhythmia. Here, it’s infiltrated by Deathspell Omega’s trademarked dissonance and a brand of vocal savagery that’s so demonic and deranged as to cloak the chaos in a mutilated mantle of ravenous horror.

Everything about the performances is jaw-dropping. The drumming is an ever-changing tour-de-force of light-speed blasting, somersaulting fills, and just enough propulsive hammering to give the helpless listener something to hold onto in these tumultuous storms of sound. The bounding, leaping, cavorting bass notes often seem to be off on a tangent of their own, and take center stage at just the right moments during subsidences in the drummer’s fireworks.

There’s a lot of high-speed riff tornados and related fret torture in play as well, veering and swarming so quickly and unpredictably that it seems there’s a kaleidoscope inside that crazed centrifuge along with your brain. Eerie, dissonant notes and warped chords come and go, along with a scattering of meandering arpeggios that don’t really slow things down — because as they sinuously twist like wraithlike serpents, the drummer usually picks those moments to pull out all the stops.

The combined effect of all this is electrifying. And I’m afraid that it is also like an addictive drug that somehow sharpens the senses just as it unmoors them from reality — I already feel a yearning to return to the music. And maybe once I collect myself enough to do so, I’ll comprehend something more of what just happened. Or not….

But either way, this album will be unforgettable.

I voted for this but I haven't come close to processing it yet

I love breathless metal-fan writing

that hyphen also works one space previous

It wouldn't be in my top 3 DO albums, but it's still p great.

7 Sumac - What One Becomes 559 Points, 15 Votes, One #1
http://i.imgur.com/qmYetXR.jpg
https://open.spotify.com/album/0s1U9VBobxvNn7Kctl5WN2
spotify:album:0s1U9VBobxvNn7Kctl5WN2

https://sumac.bandcamp.com/album/what-one-becomes

SUMAC (Aaron Turner on guitar and vocals, Nick Yacyshyn on drums, and Brian Cook on bass) invests in the recursive exercises of chaos and control, which manifest on the band’s second album What One Becomes. The trio’s debut The Deal (2015) revealed a new side of Turner’s combustible songwriting and guitar work, further expanding on his efforts in Isis and Old Man Gloom. On the new album, the trio has elevated the songs’ complexities with a greater entanglement of velocity, density, form, and function. The results are a testament to the tour-honed collective intuition and technical skills of drummer Yacyshyn (Baptists), bassist Cook (Russian Circles, These Arms Are Snakes, Botch) and Turner. The music of What One Becomes requires that each player be attuned to the dynamics and the tension within the multilateral structures.

On “Clutch Of Oblivion” the riff develops from a languid desert-rock melody and blossoms into a dense aggregate of rhythm, force, and vigor. A muscular hypno-rock aspiration burns out before reaching escape orbit, and the ensuing plummet of solitary guitar notes lead the band into the realm of introspection before another volley of motorik pummel. “Rigid Man” begins as a lurching epithet that finds the trio in a shadow boxing lockstep for the song’s first half of pugilistic rhythm and noise, only to smash itself on the ground amidst a diabolical feedback whorl from Turner’s guitar and to tear free from the rhythmic underbelly, tapping into the vein of unhinged expressionism howled by Les Rallizes Denudes and Caspar Brotzmann Massaker.

There is a profound anxiety that leaches through What One Becomes. SUMAC's choreographed structures parallel the internal and personal struggles with anxiety. They seek to identify the source, devise a course of action, and confront that condition at hand. Turner explains, “Much of it has to do with questioning fabricated structures of identity and what it means when those structures are destabilized by contact with the outside. That has been a unnerving process to undergo, but also fruitful in terms of discovering the path to individuation and realized connection with the self. Another facet of experience I’m working to convey is about living with the sustained presence of anxiety, and avoiding reliance on musical devices of cathartic release to provide escape from this condition.” Sumac channels psychic distress into their rigorously algebraic maneuvers and syllable-crack dissonance. These are an acts of honesty in the face of a particular conduction as well as acutely prescient designs of musical intensity that commands attention to all of this detail.
credits
released June 10, 2016

7.8

Sumac, Aaron Turner’s new trio, succeeds at making minimalist doom metal because they recall what fans of Isis loved without resembling his past work in the slightest. Sludgy heaviness and melody meet as before, but they clash instead of meld, and their fraught coexistence is drawn out. Turner attempted this with Split Cranium, a collaboration with Finnish experimental/metal linchpin Jussi Lehtisalo, but the space he affords himself in Sumac goes a long way. What One Becomes, Sumac’s follow-up to their debut The Deal, feels both more whole and more deconstructed, and that it arrived a little over a year after shows how focused they are on adapting as a unit.

They demand more patience of you here, leaning harder on slowness until it starts to feel like claustrophobia. There are fewer faster metal freakouts here than on Deal, which make them all the more jarring when they shatter the peace. Sumac unleash most of their fury on leadoff song “Image on Control,” filled with skronky guitar scrapes, blastbeats and doomy stomps. The closest that One gets to any melodic pleasantries is in “Clutch of Oblivion,” where Turner lets a melody flicker for four minutes, a carrot for those demanding a Panopticon revival, before blasting it into oblivion. He then takes one last stab at the hardcore prevalent in Split Cranium, meditating on a crunchy buildup before unleashing. Even if it’s more recognizable, Turner knows how to ride a riff out, boiling it down to its most base hypnosis.

Throughout One, the sound is so wide-open that it threatens to come apart, but drummer Nick Yacychyn, also of Vancouver hardcore group Baptists, keeps a solid grounding. His playing is the group's secret weapon, and his sensibility makes One sound like Khanate with groove on the brain. (Turner’s guitar tone also approaches the metallic drear that Stephen O’Malley channeled in that group.) His flexibility makes the 17-minute “Blackout” an exercise in indulgence that doesn’t exactly feel like one. His steady tom work carries the piece through plundering depths, ambient segues, and a halfway mark that’s equal parts speed metal and modern classical.

One feels more improvisatory than most of any of the members’ prior works (especially bassist Brian Cook, better known for his work in modern prog-metal heroes Russian Circles), and that makes it alien to most metal. Sumac are pushing metal in a direction so uncomfortable it may cease to be metal, into an openness that isn't about saying “FUCK YOU!” the loudest. The result is some of his most exciting work since Isis disbanded.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21889-what-one-becomes/

I liked the 1st album but this was a really huge step up

agreed!

and hey I got one dead-on!

long time lurker here - the sumac was in my top ten. Much better than the first album. Awesome live too

If the whole album had been as good as Rigid Man (I) then it'd have been one of the best metal albums of the...decade? But I'm a little resistant to the rest of the album's charms. It may well click one day though!

like Khanate with groove on the brain

Sold.

xp

the whole album is great.

I think I like it better than any Isis album tbh

Wouldn't go that far

3 Sumac - 7
4 Jute Gyte - 10
9 Schammasch - 9

I finally nailed an exact prediction with Schammasch for #9.

Not really sure it's worth doing a spotify results playlist as no one subscribes to it. Only 5 this year have

We don't have to bother with the rest, Krallice just released metal AOTY.

Seriously though, DsO is actually lower than I thought; I was the guy who voted it #1 - it may be short but not a single second is wasted.

(I don't use Spotify sorry CS)

My prediction for #6 is SubRosa.

what did everyone pick as #6 when they made their top 20 guesses earlier?

6 Cobalt - Slow Forever 563 Points, 14 Votes, One #1
http://i.imgur.com/o1BULAy.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/5yOrSjOeKeOiyWEm34y3H4
spotify:album:5yOrSjOeKeOiyWEm34y3H4

https://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/slow-forever

Colorado’s COBALT, over the years and since they began working with Profound Lore Records with 2007’s landmark “Eater Of Birds” album, have become recognized as one of the most singular and defining extreme American metal bands today. Their 2009 album “Gin” is recognized as a pillar in American extreme metal, a milestone album of literature-influenced progressive apocalyptic wasteland metal that took the American metal scene by storm and landed on pretty much all best-of year end lists the year it came out.

Now almost exactly seven years since the release of “Gin”, COBALT (now defined as the duo of multi-instrumentalist/mastermind Erik Wunder and new vocalist Charlie Fell, ex-LORD MANTIS) are poised to releases one of the most anticipated metal releases of 2016, their long-awaited new double album “Slow Forever”

“Slow Forever” sees COBALT, after years dealing with personal turbulence, tragedy, contemplation, and even confusion, return triumphant and focused as ever. With Wunder formulating their sound that naturally takes off where “Gin” left off and new vocalist Fell bringing a new character and sense of savagery and violence that’s synonymous with the COBALT sound, “Slow Forever” is another epic offering from the COBALT cannon destined to hammer down and make its notable impact as one of the most defining metal albums to be released in 2016.
credits
released March 25, 2016

Cobalt are:
Erik Wunder (all instruments)
Charlie Fell (vocals)

Recorded, mixed, and mastered by Dave Otero at Flatline Audio in Denver, CO.

8.4

When do you last remember a respected band replacing a lead singer and actually getting better? This is the central anomaly of the brilliant and brave Slow Forever, the first album in seven years from the reborn metal duo Cobalt. For a decade, Cobalt made mad, warped dashes through black metal, summoning the spirit and language of hero Ernest Hemingway alongside the imagery and intensity of singer Phil McSorley’s stints in the U.S. Army. But without McSorley, Cobalt has opened its sound, fully embracing the blues, country, hardcore, and hard rock strains that have long been latent in its music. Slow Forever is as accessible as it is aggressive, with magnetic hooks, shout-along mantras, and sparkling riffs all anchoring this eighty-minute maelstrom. It is an electrifying, enthralling opus.

Two years ago, it seemed Cobalt would never make another record. Half a decade had passed since the pair’s landmark Gin, when, in March 2014, McSorley announced he was out; a month later, he was back in, set to work on new material with childhood friend and Cobalt co-founder Erik Wunder. But in December of that year, McSorley took a series of brutally misogynistic, homophobic online shots at other bands. Wunder cut him loose. In retrospect, it seems like serendipity, as Lord Mantis, Charlie Fell’s manic sludge band from Chicago, was publicly splitting at the seams, too. Wunder asked Fell—"the only guy that came to mind when I thought about somebody who could replace Phil," he has said—to enlist. They spent the third quarter of 2015 reinventing Cobalt in a Colorado recording studio.

Those fraught beginnings ripple through Slow Forever, where the songs stem from abject depravity, or from a mindset where nothing goes right and hope is only a useless four-letter word. Images of drug abuse, sexual frustration, emotional exhaustion, self-mutilation, wanton violence, and outright dejection flash by one by one, suggesting a Charles Bukowski biopic produced by David Cronenberg. "I am not a man/I am just a dog," Fell shrieks and repeats above clattering drums and bullying guitars within the first six minutes. "Condone the act of self-destruction," he roars much later, with militant drums and a clarion riff buttressing his pronouncement. "A ritual/And bury it, bury it in the veins of lovers." Fell paints a sort of cosmic portrait with these very human flaws and faults. These failures—the "pinnacle of the archetype," as he puts it at one point—are the natural order, the way it will always be. "The past in a pile of ash, forgotten in the cycle," he offers by way of summary.

Even during instrumental interludes and extended introductions, Cobalt seems to be preparing for conflict, for coming face-to face with the demons inside Fell’s words. "Beast Whip," a song about perpetual dissatisfaction, batters its subject with a series of blast beats and D-beats; Fell seems to be screaming at his own thoughts, demanding more from himself. When "Elephant Graveyard" takes up the cycle of addiction, the music illustrates the mania by inciting a circle pit before fading into a long, slow comedown.

Fell is more versatile and nuanced than McSorley, his predecessor. His work here even suggests a range and finesse that his time in Lord Mantis didn’t, firmly establishing him as one of metal’s great new vocalists. During "Cold Breaker," he launches from a hardcore yammer to a doom-metal roar, alternately summoning the Dead Kennedys and Eyehategod as the music shifts around him. When he emits pained, animalistic screams or haunting, ghostly yells, he’s horror-film terrifying. But he’s not averse to fists-up, muscles-clenched chants, either, and those are what make Slow Forever so unexpectedly approachable. For "King Rust," he returns to a credo—"Hoisting myself out of myself," shouted in a staccato clip and enunciated so that it sticks. It feels motivational, inspiring. "Ruiner" hinges on a duet between Fell’s voice and Wunder’s winding riff, the two trading lines like they’re in Thin Lizzy. Of all the things Cobalt or Lord Mantis ever were, "catchy" was never one of them. On Slow Forever, Wunder and Fell, gleefully grim, stumble into that territory.

Cobalt’s albums have always depended upon a sense of ultimate urgency—life or death, do or die, kill or be killed. Because of the circumstances around its creation, Slow Forever felt that way before it was finished; had Wunder bungled Cobalt’s restart without McSorley, he would have looked like the fool who just didn’t know when or how to stop. Slow Forever thrives in that existential anxiety, as though Wunder and Fell realized they had a lot to lose but even more to gain. As surprising as it may seem for an album where death, despair, and destruction linger in every word, Cobalt gambled on resurrection and, against the odds, advanced.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21685-cobalt-slow-forever/

wooo I'm on a roll!

I like this a lot even if they swapped one asshole vocalist for another

music is full of assholes but i dunno anything about the new guy

Okay so next is SubRosa? Or Furia, which was my #12 prediction.

I'm basing this solely on some of the more o_O Lord Mantis lyrics xp

I didn't think they could top Gin but they did.

Siegbran, what were your favourite dungeon synth/space metal/sleep-aid albums this year?

― illbient microtonal poetry Surbiton (imago)

Well Empty Space Meditations obviously! And the Cold Meat Industry tribute Ancient Meat Revived, all drone/space metal. What else, Basarabian Hills of couse, and pulling out all the stops in the prettiness department there's Skyforest Unity which features probably the least manly cover art ever to appear on a metal album: a white swan on a lake, wearing pink ribbons.

Sumac sounds good so far.

I realised why I didn't keep spinning the Jute Gyte after the summer. The compositions are great but I feel like he could use a mixing engineer. It would probably be an AOTY contender if, say, Colin Marston produced it.

5 Subrosa - For This We Fought The Battle of Ages 648 Points, 16 Votes, TWO #1's
http://i.imgur.com/yfW2dnv.jpg
https://open.spotify.com/album/3dsDScersy505OGCi0fIAl
spotify:album:3dsDScersy505OGCi0fIAl

https://profoundlorerecords.bandcamp.com/album/for-this-we-fought-the-battle-of-ages

With their anticipated new album “For This We Fought The Battle Of Ages”, Salt Lake City doom-chamber metal band SUBROSA have created their most triumphant and most enveloping album to date. Continuing the momentum with 2013’s highly acclaimed turning point album “No Help For The Mighty Ones”, which saw year end acclaim in all metal and mainstream music outlets respectively, said album brought a new awareness to SUBROSA as one of the most prominent doom-infused metal bands from America today through their singular crushing monolithic sound canvas which consists of a devastating mix of soul crushing doom metal, neo-classical chamber music (solidified by the band’s two electric violin players), and Appalachian murder balladry all filtered through the veil of American gothic tragedy.

“For This We Fought The Battle Of Ages” sees SUBROSA expanding their sound to a new plateau with their heaviest, darkest, and most dynamic-sounding album to date through bigger-sounding production value (the new album was fully engineered and mixed by drummer Andy Patterson). With the awareness brought onto the band with the new album’s predecessor, which also saw SUBROSA on their most active touring schedule yet, “For This We Fought The Battle Of Ages” will bring more demand and awareness to the band as they prepare to unveil their most important and crucial album in their repertoire.
credits
released August 26, 2016

Recorded and mixed by Andy Patterson
Mastered by Brad Boatright @ Audiosiege
Artwork & Design by Glyn Smyth @ Stag & Serpent

8.2

On their fourth full-length, the Salt Lake City doom band SubRosa take inspiration from a 100-year-old dystopian novel about a modern surveillance state. The resulting album is their best yet.

For This We Fought the Battle of the Ages—the fourth album by Salt Lake City doom-and-drama masters SubRosa—takes its inspiration from We, an almost 100-year-old dystopian novel by Russian writer Yevgeny Zamyatin. We is a paralyzing, prescient portrait of a modern surveillance state, where a world made of glass prevents secrets and state policies curtail pleasurable sex. We predates George Orwell’s Animal Farm and 1984 by two decades and helped shape a literary tradition where the chief concern is exactly how much state authority can overpower individual autonomy. It is a most relevant anxiety in 2016. But an hour-length album that lifts lines, themes, and arcs from an especially didactic framework? That may sound like a bit much.

During the last decade, though, SubRosa has steadily learned to make the obscure accessible, to open up the high-volume lurch and heavy-menace scowl of doom to an ever-widening audience. Founder and leader Rebecca Vernon has woven threads of bewitching folk and magnetic grunge into her metal, an approach epitomized by 2013’s More Constant Than the Gods. Backed by a fleet of violins and a rhythm section that could quickly sink from featherweight to heavyweight, Vernon’s anthems pulled you into their oversized gothic churn. And on Battle of Ages—yet again, the best work of SubRosa’s career—she doubles down on the ability to make the esoteric compelling. This is grand, unapologetic doom metal that should also fit fans of symphonies, post-rock bands, and alt-rock radio. And this is writing so rich that it raises deep, pressing questions about our very existence with richly written scenes and sharply posed worries. You may want to press “pause” just to ponder, but the brooding, booming music demands you move onward.

Four of Battle of Ages’ six songs break the 10-minute mark, with two lasting for a quarter-hour. These unabashed track lengths give SubRosa room to roam and the ability to fold a panoply of sounds and ideas into one space. “Black Majesty,” for instance, opens with Vernon singing a black widow’s lullaby (“Isn’t it good to be acquainted with darkness?” she begins) over crackling electronics. The song soon lunges forward, though: room-rattling drums cut beneath a low-slung riff before the whole band shifts into a double-time sprint, where screeching violins intensify the raw nerves of the rhythm section. There are strong hooks and soft harmonies, a section that feels like Cocteau Twins gauze and another that feels like Silver Mt. Zion-sized fury. And these are just accessories to lyrics where Vernon poignantly wonders about the redemption inherent in mortality and the error inevitable in myth. “We love the taste of false perfection/The more the lies, the more we laud,” she seethes amid a complicated bridge. The line pulls all her abstraction into a political moment where a reality television star sits near the brink of the presidency.

Elsewhere, Vernon softly sings folk music in Italian over a plucked lyre. The band pits death metal barks against seraphic harmonies during “Wound of the Warden,” a 13-minute sprawl where the midsection could be a rock radio classic unto itself. “Troubled Cells” conjures a loneliness and despair so exquisite it might as well be a murder ballad, while the shout-along coda reimagines the Arcade Fire’s mix of gang vocals and strings with more interest in dark than light. It’s no small wonder that SubRosa’s most ambitious work, where songs last as long as television shows, doubles as its most compulsory listen. Both qualities stem from SubRosa’s command of so many styles and ability to hide the seams that stitch them together.

Novelistic inspiration, turns out, suits SubRosa perfectly, as it matches the band’s scale, where big ideas about life, death, freedom, and love are emboldened by songs that pull in influences like a vortex. Sure, For This We Fought the Battle of the Ages shares themes and scenes with We, from which it, like Orwell did, lifts a worried vision for the future. More important, though, is that it shares the audacity to reimagine how the world looks or sounds. Zamyatin was an architect of what has become an idiom. And few doom bands operate with the urgency and inclusion of SubRosa, a group that’s made an album you can’t escape about a world you wish you could.

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/22251-for-this-we-fought-the-battle-of-ages/

always loved these guys, now when the hell am I gonna get to see 'em live

Cheers Siegbran! I liked what I heard of Urfaust. tt and I have already been charmed and bewitched by the Skyforest cover (she may have voted for it?) and (SPOILER) I voted for Basarabian Hills :D but yeah will check out that other one too

I've been a fan for a while but TBH those reviews are more compelling than the album

I think it is their best album. They just keep getting better and better every album.

its quiet today so I assume a lot of people are on holiday so lets try liven things up by guessing what is up next?

I have it as Aluk Todolo on my predictor ballot...so it'll probably be something else

Hoping that my late decision to chuck Furia on my ballot hasn't pushed it ahead of a certain Finnish trip into the oscillating void

Aluk Todolo surely next though

Maybe everyone decided Aluk Todolo were boring and it's Xoth

My ballot is turning out to be very hivemind-ish this year. 4 of my top 5 are in the top 5.

i love surprises and wrong predictions

I would die xxp

The SubRosa is impressive, but also kind of a dirge. I'd guess Furia, my #4 already showed.

4 Vektor - Terminal Redux 657 Points, 17 Votes, THREE #1's
http://i.imgur.com/W0x78py.jpg

https://open.spotify.com/album/56ZRTTv25E2OO7FLuLokkX
spotify:album:56ZRTTv25E2OO7FLuLokkX

https://vektor.bandcamp.com/album/terminal-redux

http://pitchfork.com/reviews/albums/21645-vektor-terminal-redux/

8.2

It seemed like only a matter of time before Vektor made their first full-blown concept album. The Philadelphia four-piece has, since its inception, been compared endlessly to Voivod (thanks in no small part to their nearly identical logo, made even more conspicuous when placed side-by-side on a tour poster), but there’s always been more to their music than pure '80s revivalism. Of course, there’s plenty of that – particularly on their crushing debut Black Future. But, on their 2011 follow-up Outer Isolation, Vektor garnished their speedy, pummeling metal with proggier flirtations: lengthy, knotty compositions about space and alternate universes. Terminal Redux, their third and finest album, takes the band’s cerebral tendencies to the next level: over the course of the album’s ten songs, vocalist and guitarist David DiSanto tells the fairly elaborate story of a military general astronaut who rises to political power among the intergalactic Cygnus regime after finding an interstellar mineral that just might be the key to immortality. Even if you choose to ignore a few minor plot points, Terminal Redux stands as one of the most thrilling, forward-thinking metal albums of the year: one that should finally shed any remaining detractors who find the band’s music to be at all derivative.

In the first track alone, Vektor manages to invoke something like an entire discography's worth of ideas. Ranging from black metal riffage to harmonic chanting to an anthemic closing guitar solo straight out of Rush’s Hemispheres, "Charging the Void" showcases a revitalized band bursting with energy and creativity. "A sky that once brought hope and light," sings DiSanto, "now brings me desolation," as his screech reaches throat-shredding levels to convey his desperation. As the song progresses, the band is intent on matching the intensity of the lyrics: setting the stage for what’s to come like an overture before an opera. While the following tracks are not all quite as virtuosic and dazzling as that opener, there are hardly any dull moments.

With its seventy-plus minute runtime, Terminal Redux occasionally threatens to become Vektor’s Tales from Topographic Oceans – a moment where their pretensions reach a head and alienate all but the already initiated. Their intensity, however, makes even the headier moments feel like breakthroughs. Tracks like "Ultimate Artificer" and "LCD (Liquid Crystal Disease)" should appease fans of the band’s more straightforward thrash material, while much of the album’s second half seems aimed at breaking the band to a larger, non-metal audience. Indeed, with this release marking the band’s upgrade to Earache Records, there are a few moments that hint at modern rock radio and festival audiences, calling to mind Baroness’ similarly expansive Yellow & Green. In the album’s most divisive moments, DiSanto sings in a surprisingly pretty, shoegaze whisper. The crawling intro to "Collapse," for example, would not sound out of place on either of Red House Painter’s self-titled albums (that is, of course, until it launches into its galloping, duel-guitar-soaked second half).

And then there’s "Recharging the Void," a song that mimics the album opener both in title and ambition. In thirteen-and-a-half minutes, it is burdened with the task of closing the album and tying the loose ends of the story (incidentally, it also seems to be where 75% of the narrative takes place). In an almost ambient middle section, DiSanto sings as melodically and sweetly as he can, while psychedelic falsetto vocals swiped from a Pentangle record float in the background like bits of meteoric dust hurtling through the cosmos. "All we ask is our story to be told," DiSanto sings, "To young, beckoning, yearning worlds." You can practically see the intergalactic cast of characters returning to the stage, swaying back and forth in solidarity.

Like most prog albums – and, hell, a good deal of metal – it’s a lot to handle all at once, and maybe a bit silly, but Vektor plays it with the straight-faced intensity of a big-budget sci-fi movie. In that sense, the album calls to mind a few wider-scope metal breakthroughs from the genre’s golden era – the raising-the-stakes intensity of Death’s Human or the laser-beam focus of Kreator’s Pleasure to Kill. In fact, if there’s anything Vektor has prominently coopted from '80s metal, it’s that specific fearlessness: a devotion to their craft and an insistence on evolving clearly from album to album. Terminal Redux presents their most fully-formed evolution yet and offers more proof that they are beholden to no one’s artistic path but their own. In fact, more bands should be following their lead.

omg

this is even more shocking than Metallica at 29

but I'm not entirely sold on it, so I'm not complaining

goddamn!

I was one of the #1s. even bought the 2xLP new, something I NEVER do. Just a ludicrous bounty. We're not worthy.