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Vader: Welcome to the morbid reich

18/11/11 || Habakuk

New Vader, yeah, well, hmm hmm, probably pretty similar to what they’ve released lately, hmm, yeah, I know what to expect, hmm hmm, pass. WRONG! Or, rather: imagine three GD staffers kicking your door in and jumping into your room in black leather uniforms, ordering you to turn your Scheiße down and change ze fucken CD already. It’s that kind of a WRONG! moment I’m looking for. So if you like Vader in general, or full-on death metal for that matter, do not pass on this album. It iz the shizz.

Vader as expected don’t stray much from what they’ve been doing on the last records, but this time they surely found their Morbid Mojo to go the extra mile and raise their standards by a good few feet. On “Welcome to the Morbid Reich” (of course a reference to their first demo), the folks around front dude and comprehensible growlshouter Peter improved their songwriting and the amount of sauce flow inducing killer riffage considerably, and produced an album that can be listened to from start to finish without any noticeable dips in quality. They also upped the number of moments when you just compulsively have to bite your upper lip, knit your brows and headbang like a cat watching a jo-jo in timelapse. You don’t even have to wait very long for that to happen, as the first actual track (#2) morphs into one beastly riff after another, which is truly sight to behold. If the first two minutes of that track don’t do anything for you, you can leave the hall.

The production has reportedly been seen punching faces left right and center in Warsaw pubs, and while it obviously is not of “Litany” caliber (you can’t pull that off more than once), there are some similarities, for example in grinding the scratchy treble from “Impressions in blood” off the guitars again and making the whole affair a good deal bass-heavier – which of course means, you won’t hear the bass guitar. The drums, too, are not as intricately woven as on “Litany” (still pretty good, don’t worry), but similarly, they don’t really have a natural sound. It’s nowhere near irritating, though, and what the sound lacks in the nature department, it makes up for in razorsharp effectiveness. In a nutshell: this album sounds damn fine, so you can concentrate on keeping up with the mostly high speed songs and enjoy the numerous half-time breaks.

So while the genuinely new songs are ace, I thoroughly enjoy the re-recorded version of “Decapitated Saints” off the debut album, too, and when holding the two versions against each other, it really strikes me how great that song was to begin with, and much Peter has grown into a bad-ass vocalist from a blurry death grumbler. I’m usually not fond of this re-recording idea, but here I definitely approve. Good shit fo’ real! It also serves as a great opportunity to appreciate that while Vader have moved from album to album with changes in many aspects (this album has an almost completely new line-up), the band’s general direction has stayed the same since the actual “Morbid Reich”: forwards, forwards, and forwards.

Information
Released: 2011
Label: Nuclear Blast
Website: Vader MySpace
Band
Peter: guitars, vocals
Spider: guitars
Hal: bass
James Stewart: drums

Tracklist
01. Ultima Thule
02. Return to the Morbid Reich
03. The black eye
04. Come and see my sacrifice
05. Only Hell knows
06. I am who feasts upon your soul
07. Don’t rip the beast’s heart out
08. I had a dream…
09. Lord of thorns
10. Decapitated saints
11. They are coming…
12. Black velvet and skulls of steel

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