Artist: Vindictiv
Label: Escape Music
Release: 2009
Runtime: 78:18
Rating: 4.5/5
Vindictiv are a Swedish outfit. And when the Swedes go after progressive metal, you really don’t want to mess with them. Of all the bands coming out of the north, Vindictiv are probably the closest to what we’d today call “flexing freely” with no limits. Let me kick off this review with the soloing: guitarist Stefan Lindholm is a dangerous Y.J. Malmsteen clone, and the keyboards, who give the guitar as good as they get in the back-and-forth, don’t budge an inch from the classic “Beethoven meets the year 2000” school when they take a solo. Add plenty of symphonic passages that even sketch out the mechanics of the likes of Royal Hunt. The cross-fire of fire-breathing between keys and guitar is simply a given, a standard Vindictiv building block.
But as always, the Scandinavian approach to progressive metal is typical. No matter how many notes per second get fired off, melodic compactness is always taken care of. This story probably already sounds a lot like Mind’s Eye to you. Vindictiv will definitely appeal to Mind’s Eye fans too, who find Scandi prog metal one of the more complex puzzles for the ears to crack. The keyboards use an important, super ear-friendly “Kevin Moore-era Dream Theater” sound, clearly separated from the guitar in the production, so the sterile-sounding Stratovarius syndrome is nowhere to be found.
The most important thing is the band’s ability to see the big picture and put compactness above fragmentation. So the songs are built on compact motifs carrying elaborate, pompous anthemic melodies, the kind we’re used to from bands like Circus Maximus, except that Vindictiv never wander into melodic hard rock territory. All the “lighter” compact motifs sit in strictly metal waters, with a venomously wound riff undercarriage that shoves forward with high-intensity force across the whole record. These lead motifs matter most in the hymn-like choruses, where the outstanding singers Goran Edman (ex-Malmsteen), Oliver Hartmann (solo, a guy with the charisma of Symphony X’s Russell Allen) and Marcus Boals (ex-Malmsteen, Royal Hunt) get to implant top-notch, authoritatively commanding melodies, which they bring to the album’s songs at full capacity.
The production is killer! Where the riff gets pushed to the front, the atmospheric wings get an extra lift from the excellent use of the background, filled out by dramatic keyboard work. In the instrumental sections you’ll suddenly realize you can just give yourself over to the solos and enjoy them, because they’re kept under control and never slip the leash of melodic compactness. The choruses, which are all atmospheric peaks, carry a solemnly grandiose, positively uplifting vibe, and the band pulls off dizzying mood swings. The first jaw-dropper comes in the title track, where a dark, orientalist, tragic and atmospherically doomed verse gets replaced by a 100% flip of melody in the chorus, through which the real light of optimism shines (a created mood). Especially thrilling and dizzying mood swings, which grow on you more and more with every listen, show up in one of the album’s darkest songs, Martha’s Song, where Boals and Edman trade verses with masterful feeling.
The songs run somewhere between 6 and 8 minutes, they don’t fight each other for the top spot, and you’ll have to find your own favorites on “Ground Zero”. Either way, Vindictiv are true musical grandmasters, and gliding through motivic variety is as natural to them as breathing. So you can keep your jaw hanging open the whole time as you enjoy the prog metal extravaganza of “Ground Zero” (progressively broken rhythms at every turn are, of course, a given too), no need to worry about that. And yet those same masters are careful not to let the ego trip run wild in a flurry of solos and wreck all the good work staked out by motivic compactness. Zoltan Csorsz sadly isn’t Mike Portnoy, but luckily Lindholm and Larsson are nowhere near Petrucci and Rudess.
It’s been a long time since we saw a progressive metal album that offered this much complex wizardry and, at the same time, melodic, compact polish. This is a revival of the golden days when prog metal was a much more popular genre, around the turn of the millennium, when records by bands like Shadow Gallery, Symphony X, Angra and Vanden Plas took your breath away with their quality, and so on… That makes “Ground Zero” all the more valuable a gem today, defying the unfortunate fact that prog metal simply isn’t in the focus of the metal masses right now. It feels utterly relaxed and utterly unburdened. In one word: “Victorious!”
Lineup
Goran Edman – vocals
Oliver Hartmann – vocals
Mark Boals – vocals
Stefan Lindholm – guitar, keyboards
Pontus Larsson – keyboards
Nalle Pahlsson – bass guitar
Zoltan Csorsz – drums
Production
Stefan Lindholm
Track list
1. Modern World
2. Ground Zero
3. Reach Out
4. Golden Gate
5. Venom
6. Tweedledum & Tweedlede
7. I´m Back Home
8. Marthas Song
9. Overshoot Day
10. No Matter What
11. The Sacrifice
