Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 4. 12. 2020
Production: Markus Teske
Album length: 61.08 min
Genre: Progressive Metal
Rating: 9.0/10
These days, Vanden Plas are basically a living relic of the once-thriving progressive metal scene, let’s call it the first wave, kicked off by Dream Theater in the late eighties, even though, truth be told, prog metal was being played before them. But when it comes to popularizing the genre, they did the most. Vanden Plas’ approach to composing and arranging clearly shows inspiration from the first era of Dream Theater. Still – and it’s almost pointless to keep repeating this – Vanden Plas are a one-of-a-kind rider of musical artistry who answer to nobody. This band’s strength is still the fact that since the very start of their career they’ve kept the same lineup of five outstanding musical talents. And to this day, Vanden Plas remain a byword for musical perfection and high artistic quality. It’s incredible that the band is constantly busy and, in a relatively short time, manages to record musically demanding concepts that come with an unbelievable creative polish.
On the new album, too, Vanden Plas stay loyal to crafting their own specific sound. Once again it was shaped by their longtime collaborator and companion Markus Teske. “The Ghost Xperiment – Illumination” is thus the continuation and closing part of the concept laid out by its predecessor, “The Ghost Xperiment – The Awakening” (RockLine review). The second part of the story, inspired by a parapsychological experiment – the Philip Experiment, carried out in 1972 in Toronto, Canada – gets its resolution and epilogue. Can an individual’s mind create its own ghosts, so that they materialize in reality? In reality as the human world knows and specifically perceives it? Vanden Plas vocalist Andy Kuntz has liked to turn to the occult and parapsychology in the past, so the chosen concept is no surprise at all. “Psychogon” – a word found in the title of the new song “The Lonely Psychogon” – in a way describes the state of an individual who, with the intensity of their thoughts, manages to summon their apparent reality, and then there’s the coinage “ouroboros,” which in ancient Greek and Egyptian mythology symbolizes a snake or dragon eating its own tail. Even if the whole thing isn’t entirely clear and obviously calls for the imagination of whoever wrestles with the album, it’s an attempt at creating a “ghost,” summoned from human consciousness, that takes on a kind of virtual materialization with the aim of telling its own story.
The playing is once again breathtaking. On this album the band has dialed up its progressive metal beat. That shows especially in the more substantial solo spots from keyboardist Günter Werno and guitarist Stephan Lill. Both musicians once again deliver the core of the essential artistic elements that have always guaranteed the great appeal of this band’s music and been a huge magnet for more demanding listeners. Time and again they astonish with their punch, inventiveness and sparkling unrestraint, in countless magical escapades of highly virtuosic payoff. The band has also woven in somewhat more orchestration than on the previous album – the first part of this conceptual story. So on first listen the album doesn’t give you the same sense of musical reconciliation as its predecessor, which means it’s again a tougher nut to crack and takes a good pile of spins to sink into your ears. In other words, at their core Vanden Plas don’t let up one bit in their search for artistic perfection. “The Ghost Xperiment – Illumination” also brims with ambition. What matters most is that the high quality standard, built on a series of brilliant predecessors, is kept up on the new album too. The excellence of songwriting this quintet has spoiled us with over the years is crowned on the new album by “The Ouroboros,” which brings together everything we understand by the name Vanden Plas in one place. The key trademarks, ripening artistically with the years. It’s a brilliant progressive metal mini epic suite.
So Vanden Plas stay true to their artistry, recognizable from a mile away, where the changes between albums come down more or less to the amount of catchy musicality – often a total stranger to the adjective “progressive” – as well as to changes in the level of progressiveness itself. In that respect, the most memorable thing on the new album is the chorus in the second song, “Under the Horizon.” It grabs you instantly. But hunting for catchiness in the realm of prog does a band like this more of a disservice than anything else. So that’s not the real measure of the quality of the artistry on offer. The whole picture of such artistry is always built from many aspects.
Enough philosophizing. The chemistry of this band remains hugely fascinating on this release too, which is distinctly darkly theatrical and at times downright doomy. In that sense, “The Ghost Xperiment – Illumination” is even one of the darkest albums of Vanden Plas’ entire career. Among the new songs, “Fatal Arcadia” stands out in particular, with a ruinous, bristling and devastating guitar phrase that even their countrymen from the Teutonic thrash metal ranks would envy. In that respect, “Fatal Arcadia” counts as one of the heaviest compositions of Vanden Plas’ whole career. With “The Ghost Xperiment – Illumination,” Vanden Plas have brought another of their complexly conceived concepts to a happy ending. The album delivers all the “classic” trademarks that long ago made this often unjustly overlooked progressive metal stronghold from the German city of Karlsruhe famous. And with great perfectionism, Vanden Plas once again deliver a feat of brilliantly balanced traits: highly accessible, flexible technical complexity and virtuous jolts of bombastic, catchy musicality. At every step, all of this is joined, contemplatively, by distinctly biting moments of dark guitar phrasing, delicately interrupted by passages that call for softness and subtlety, where Andy Kuntz’s top-notch vocal qualities shine through once again.
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Tracklist:
1. When The World Is Falling Down
2. Under The Horizon
3. Black Waltz Death
4. The Lonely Psychogon
5. Fatal Arcadia
6. The Ouroboros
7. Ghost Engineers
8. Krieg kennt keine Sieger (feat. Alea / orig. Saltatio Mortis)
Lineup:
Andy Kuntz – vocals
Stephan Lill – guitar
Günter Werno – keyboards
Andreas Lill – drums
Torsten Reichert – bass guitar
