Vektor - The Dark Future of Thrash Metal

Anthrax, Megadeth, Metallica and Slayer are the four best-known and most celebrated names in the long saga of thrash metal. The third of these names experienced such an explosion of fame in the '90s that it became familiar to a crossover audience, far wider than the metalhead cliques scattered around the world. And while Anthrax and Megadeth remain essential reference points for any self-respecting listener of extreme sounds, only Slayer, buoyed by the mythical aura surrounding their absolute masterpiece, "Reign In Blood" (1986), can claim any place in the popular imagination of rock fans at large.

When the most important tour in the history of thrash metal, the "Clash Of The Titans", kicked off in 1990, it featured precisely the names mentioned above, with the exception of Metallica, who would soon abandon their heavier sound. During the tour's various European and American legs, the name Testament also stood out, another institution of US thrash metal, as did, thought-provokingly, Alice In Chains, at the time busy promoting their debut "Facelift". The tour, which also stopped in Florence and Milan in September, is probably thrash metal's moment of peak exposure. Already by 1991 the situation had changed profoundly: Metallica released their untitled bestseller, veering toward a less extreme, less fast sound; in 1991 grunge, with "Nevermind" by Nirvana, became a phenomenon that left an indelible mark on popular culture and pushed the Seattle bands into stores and charts. Thrash metal's moment of fame within pop culture had thus inevitably passed, never to return.

In the final years of the millennium, metal remained ever-present, but in forms that had little to do with the furious speed, themes and stylistic peculiarities of thrash metal. Among the names drawing a wide audience were Tool, Rage Against The Machine, Nine Inch Nails and a handful of grunge acts that engaged with heavier sounds, such as Soundgarden and, above all, Alice in Chains, the very band that in 1990 had shared a stage with the thrash legends. After the success of nu-metal and the rise of even more extreme sonic expressions such as death metal and grindcore, the space left for thrash metal on store shelves and in the charts kept shrinking.

There exists, however, a scene that, without ever reaching the mainstream, not even briefly, managed to point to a different path, an alternative trajectory for thrash metal that proved far more fertile than the main road taken by Metallica and co. A thread can be traced starting from "To Mega Therion" (1985) by Celtic Frost and "Killing Technology" (1987) by Voivod, running through bands and albums that offer extreme music capable of describing alternative worlds, developing philosophical viewpoints, incorporating bold experimentation, and reclaiming the compositional ambition of the most elaborate progressive rock.

An entire world of technical-thrash-metal and progressive-thrash-metal that has included bands important to all of extreme music, such as Coroner, Toxik, Mekong Delta, Watchtower, Obliveon and Believer. Music that is often arduous to play and demanding to listen to, representing the other side of thrash metal - the side that never went back to midtempos and catchiness, unlike the Metallica of the "Black Album" or the Megadeth of "Countdown To Extinction" (1992). To this underground, uncompromising and extreme contingent, and to the thrash metal now forgotten by the world of mainstream music, belong the US band Vektor.

Experimental universe designed to destroy itself

In 2002, David DiSanto founded Vektor in Arizona. He wrote and played everything himself, drawing various musicians into the project who would, however, prove to be only passing presences. After three demos, the band's definitive lineup began to take shape, featuring, alongside DiSanto (guitar and vocals), Erik Nelson (guitar), Blake Anderson (drums) and Frank Chin (bass). This is the quartet that recorded and released the blistering 2009 debut Black Future. The record offers a highly elaborate thrash metal, prone to long instrumental passages and capable of evoking, depending on the moment, the classics of Slayer, Metallica, Sadus, Sodom, Exodus and Kreator. Beyond these sources of inspiration, David DiSanto's strangled screams, combined with Blake Anderson's rhythmic barrages, frequently invite comparisons to black metal aesthetics.

Clocking in at over 68 minutes, Black Future stands as one of the longest albums in thrash metal, a genre that usually stops the clock well before the hour mark. Even more unusual, the record contains no fewer than three tracks exceeding ten minutes, one of which even breaks the 13-minute barrier. It would be easy to accuse it of being overlong, were it not a rare example of thrash metal able to stand alongside the classics of the '80s and '90s.

The title track is the ideal synthesis of the dizzying geometries and aggression the genre has experimented with throughout its long history. An assault that fuses surgical technique with sheer ferocity, an instrumental tour de force that, whenever it allows itself to slow down, does so alongside DiSanto's piercing screams, echoing through a hostile, dystopian universe. From the very start, in fact, the band's cosmic dimension is evident, as are the towering proportions of their music and the cosmic-horror-steeped inspirations behind the lyrics. The catastrophe awaiting us is not a nuclear war or an unknown pandemic, but rather the intervention of superhuman forces worthy of a Lovecraft who has picked up an electric guitar. Indeed, the song sounds like an aesthetic manifesto and opens with such menacing lines as:

Energetic pulse rippling out from our world

an undead galactic master sleeps within a sub-spatial realm

dark waves traverse the astral plane, the demonoid awakes

nebular projections pierce the fabric of space

the anti-being comes through

black future!

The following “Oblivion” is a labyrinth of instrumental variations, killer accelerations and whirling solos, while the vocals cut in with Luciferian high notes capable of mutating into ferocious roars. “Destroying The Cosmos”, opened by desolate chimes in a psychedelic haze, brings to mind Metallica's mini-suite, albeit pushed to the point of becoming restless and schizophrenic, visionary and unpredictable.

When the tempos stretch out, the band gives its best, as can be clearly heard on “Forest Of Legend”, ten and a half minutes worthy of an anthology of the era's metal. The folk-metal opening, mysterious in its skipping gait, foreshadows an explosion of dizzying interplay, melodic textures and thrilling dynamite blasts. Within its folds, a poetics of despair and desolation also emerges. The final two minutes are where the emotional side joins and merges perfectly with the brutal side, as if rediscovering the feeling at the heart of the blood of battle. The long coda thus becomes a way of expressing, beyond ferocity and pyrotechnic geometries, a deeper union of violence and emotion. The closing lines reveal a clear fantasy-literature imprint, though tinted black:

A strange world thrives on a floor of decay,

from broken rubble, breaking through the fray…

A forest!

A new assault, “Hunger Violence”, more restless, schizophrenic compositions (“Deoxyribonucleic Acid”) and the ferocity of “Asteroid” lead into the two majestic closing tracks. “Dark Nebula” betrays its cosmic inspiration right from the title: ten and a half minutes opening with a synth, before launching into devastating assaults and dances in odd time signatures, releasing the tension in a gust of galactic psychedelia around the fifth minute. Fragmented into alien blips, the composition rebuilds itself from guitar melodies that only later open onto a symphonic moment, embellished by the voice. A ska-tinged passage, an unusually catchy solo and prog-rock sweetness follow one another in the unexpectedly serene coda.

If it were necessary, however, to reduce the entire legacy of Vektor to a single composition, it would be “Accelerating Universe”, one of the metal masterpieces of the era. It opens with a majestic charge, a crash course in the power of thrash metal, before we find ourselves plunged headlong into a harrowing abyss shot through with black-metal shades, where DiSanto spits out his lines alternating a menacing, possessed tone with raptor-like, Luciferian high notes.

While proceeding unstoppably, the track seems ever closer to falling apart, as if its labyrinthine geometries, rhythmic whirlwinds and the arsenal of mutant riffs battering it were bound to overload it until it explodes, collapses, shatters as a victim of its own incorrigible structure. On the contrary, the composition is a masterful mechanism that disorients the listener without dissipating its own charge, channeling it instead into melodic, epic surges.

At the four-minute mark the track's load-bearing “theme” is introduced, before a cooldown sets in that absorbs thrilling folk-metal fantasies within it. Slowing down and thinning out, the track almost seems to settle at the five-minute mark, when with a fantastic twist it weaves an epic guitar melody, exploding into an instrumental fantasy that fades into cosmic drones.

At the seven-minute mark we drift among galaxies, in a mood as fascinating as it is mysterious, when distant guitar chimes bring us back to reality: psych-rock sweetness worthy of Pink Floyd and a moving folk melody carry us through to the end of the ninth minute. Returning to the thrash-metal whirlwind, with the load-bearing theme reprised and the black-metal-tinged passage repeated, the track's inexhaustible energy can finally be channeled into a furious onslaught that, at the twelve-minute mark, synthesizes the entire composition: first an annihilating thrash/black blast, then a timid guitar in the background laying down a melodic line, and then a glorious, epic explosion.

It closes with one last reprise of the theme, a pyrotechnic slowdown and one final, liberating guitar slash echoing into the void. Once again, the lyrics are full of cosmic-horror imagery:

Obscure flickers in the distance,

These lights blinked out of existence.

Dying systems pulled through a void,

Experimental universe designed to destroy itself

Unknown destination

After such a complex debut, anticipation for the second album is loaded with both expectation and worry. The fear is of a compromise that would reduce the band's stylistic richness and align them with the countless epigones of classic thrash metal. Outer Isolation (2011, reissued in 2013) is a shorter work, running just over 50 minutes, but more varied: the psychedelic doses increase significantly, and prog-metal compositional excursions come to the fore.

The only track over ten minutes long is the opener “Cosmic Cortex”, opened in the now-familiar climate of mystery and then driven, acceleration after acceleration, into an exhilarating breakneck run where DiSanto manages to sing in a way that's if anything even more extreme than on the debut, alternating a sickly growl with chilling high notes. In the finale, the slowdown makes one almost physically feel a harrowing vertigo, heightened by damned screams and the usual mastery in handling the rhythm section.

Even when they slow down, Vektor sound no less devastating, as well demonstrated by "Echoless Chamber", which between the first and second minute builds a devastating sonic machine: rhythmic machine-gun bursts, deafening screams and odd time signatures for one of the most thrilling passages of their career. When they return to a more traditional thrash-metal, they're students who can rival the masters, as well demonstrated by "Tetrastructural Mind": a double-bass barrage worthy of an ovation, a scream that quotes Slayer's "Angel Of Death", folk-metal melodic openings. The road leading to psych-rock is traveled in both directions on "Venus Project", which ranges from thrash-metal to a hallucinated march, relaxes into an aristocratic prog-rock, and returns to metallic power for a final assault. Still more innovative is "Fast Paced Society", torn apart by sudden accelerations, injected with jazz, marked by strange experiments on vocal timbres, and characterized by a restlessness that puts it at the top of their most schizophrenic tracks.

Closing the record is the title track: doom strikes and psychedelia at the start lead into a new charge, this time colored by a few lightning-fast flashes that recall the most extreme grindcore and Orthrelm's unrepeatable experiment "OV". At the five-minute mark we're catapulted into the confession of a nocturnal creature, with a neoclassical solo that carries us into a lunar landscape. At the seven-minute mark this monster-creature returns with its horrible nightmarish voice, foreshadowing a finale of striking intensity.

Outer Isolation confirms the band's stature, even if it doesn't replicate the near-miracle of their debut. Above all, it succeeds in framing Vektor more and more as an ultra-technical extreme-metal band, rather than a simple offshoot of thrash-metal.

Recharging the void

After almost five years of silence, Terminal Redux finds the American quartet facing a challenge: breaking free more and more from the sound of their debut. Underpinned by a space-themed concept with rock-opera touches, Vektor spice up their cosmic, dystopian narrative built on extreme metal with some substantial new elements: more vocal variety, a modest increase in melodic elements, and frenzied accelerations that more often veer into grindcore territory.

The opener is "Charging The Void", nine minutes in the style of "Black Future" that nonetheless surprise even longtime listeners with soul choruses in the final section. "Cygnus Terminal" (eight minutes) opts for a slower pace and for explosions in place of supersonic bursts: the guitars climb, supported by non-linear rhythms that drive the dramatic escalations of the vocals. Melody is used to depict cosmic landscapes, wrapping the track in a mystery well translated into structures that are hard to predict. The opening trio closes with "LCD (Liquid Crystal Disease)", without the ghost of Black Future being substantially dispelled.

Next, with "Ultimate Artificier", "Pteropticon" and "Psychotropia", we witness another tremendous summary of three decades of thrash-metal and its offshoots. A catalogue of mechanical riffs, of dizzying geometries, of imposing instrumental assaults that bring to mind many of thrash-metal's essential bands, from Slayer to Mekong Delta.

New fodder for the most hardened metalheads, but little that seems to surpass what was already heard on the first two albums. More interesting is "Pillars Of Sand", which in its encyclopedic summary is so varied that it always seems on the verge of chaos, tangled in a mutating structure that barely allows you to follow its downright rollicking twists and turns: it's "only" five minutes long, but it's an impressive crash course in metallic extremism.

The track most likely to spark debate, "Collapse" (nine and a half minutes), is the equivalent of Metallica's "One": a song that starts melodic and turns aggressive and armor-plated. The first three minutes are the most predictable, after which it attempts to merge the thrash/black soul with that of the ballad. A curious result, revealing an unexpected accessibility and registering a vocal variety entirely new for the band. Arriving after more than an hour at "Recharging The Void" (thirteen and a half minutes), the album closes with a display of stylistic variety, a monument to the most eclectic thrash-metal marked by a central section, with angelic voices, that borders on the absurd in this sonic context. The operatic choirs evoke power-metal territories that do, rarely, surface in their songs.

As mentioned, the evolution compared to the first two albums is only partial, since too often the band reprises its hyperkinetic, progressive thrash-metal tracks. In a work of over 73 minutes, arriving after almost five years of waiting, one might have expected more room for new ideas, despite the sheer spectacle of their synthesis. In any case, with the trilogy completed by this Terminal Redux, Vektor have virtually put a definitive stamp on thrash-metal, from its origins to the 2010s, unafraid to engage with a broad and multifaceted sonic universe.

In 2020, after worrying news had repeatedly surfaced about a definitive breakup, DiSanto and Erik Nelson announced that they were reforming the band. They inaugurated this long-awaited return with "Activate", a track that doesn't resolve the fundamental doubt: is there a future for Vektor?