Label: Ellefson Music Productions
Release date: 2016
Production: Bill Metoyer
Album length: 57.23 min
Genre: Speed Metal/Thrash Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
Helstar, the indestructible veterans of American old-school speed/thrash metal from Houston (Texas), are back with a new studio album, “Vampiro”. For anyone who knows the band, that title sounds incredibly familiar. Back in 1989, Helstar put out their fourth studio album, “Nosferatu”, which to this day remains the most ambitious and also the most revered record of their career.
With their last three studio albums, “The King of Hell” (2008), “Glory of Chaos” (2010) and “This Wicked Nest” (2014), Helstar proved that after all these years of defiance they’ve still got an extraordinary creative spark and real artistic maturity, so they obviously felt it was time for a second chapter in the story of the Transylvanian Count Vlad II and his bloodthirsty, good-for-nothing deeds. If history has taught us anything, when a band decides to add a “part two” or sequel to its (classic) album, the one that brought it worldwide fame, huge respect and recognition, years later, it’s usually a double-edged move. More often a bad one, if not downright pointless, than anything else. Well, with “Vampiro” you absolutely can’t say that.
“Vampiro” keeps the band’s creative charge alive well into their golden years, and it’s another superb studio achievement from these tough Texas metalheads! What does that mean? Sum up what you picked up from listening to the previous three albums and the answers are right there for the taking.
First things first: James Rivera’s vocals! The man is unbelievably well preserved for his age. He screams and howls with an explosive force that hasn’t dropped a notch through all his years of defiance. The authoritative and (mostly) clean melodic vocal delivery, which dominates the guitar phrases, is often backed by extra vocal lines (three or more) especially in the choruses, and so is once again nicely harmonized. These days Helstar also use more brutalized vocal excesses (a pouty, shrieking, guttural throatiness), which beef up the already sinister and aggressive attitude of the new hellish record. Rivera is still in love with Ronnie James Dio, as well as Rob Halford, and that’s just a constant with him. His versatile vocal pose, or approach, comes across as wholly devoted, heartfelt and fully lived-in in every single second of this record.
Rob Trevino, who for many years formed an almost inseparable, eternal, even ideal guitar duo with Barragan in the classic Helstar lineup, announced his departure from the band, and he was replaced by a much younger but extremely promising and ambitious guitar virtuoso, Andrew Atwood, who came to Helstar from the lesser-known band The Scourge. Yet the guitar work remains completely “unfazed”. Atwood has fully filled in every single piece of the puzzle that Trevino once brought to Helstar. Alongside Rivera, Larry Barragan steps up as the main songwriter on the new album, while Atwood subtly follows the already familiar rhetoric of Barragan’s guitar playing, that is, the rhetoric of Helstar guitar playing. To put it bluntly: swapping Trevino for Atwood doesn’t show in Helstar at all. Outstanding riffs, often dynamically “torn apart” by destructive, hellish speed, a dash of aggression and a touch of the sinister, which fits right in with the stories themselves about the greatest Transylvanian zombie and two-legged bloodsucker, to whom the album’s poetry is dedicated. What’s more, the guitar work even gains in inspiration, which you feel especially in the prominent guitar duels the two guitarists trade as equals all the way through this record. The instrumental middle sections are further spiced up with witty guitar solos, sharpness and performance dynamite, and newcomer Atwood and veteran Barragan never run out of steam any time soon.
The new batch of songs keeps a welcome variety of ideas in its choice of lead motifs and the development of the compositions. That’s how Helstar achieve a tasty dynamic effect across the album, since it’s also driven by the many different moods that the seasoned quintet masterfully brings back to life here. As expected, the atmosphere is dark, tense, evil, even schizophrenic. A true horror theater, in other words! The drama of all dramas. Without a shred of feeling for romance. There are also definitely traces of baroque classicism, which evokes the feel of a real film script (Helstar’s metal recipe, of course).
In how its melodies develop, “Vampiro” sounds old-school American metal. The poisonous riffs would rather swerve toward half-tone solutions in their structure than give off the feeling of a musical “comedy”. It doesn’t get more authentic than this. Put this album in the player and you instantly connect with the elemental core of that branch of metal, which the first bands, led by Helstar, created across the Atlantic pond back in the first half of the eighties. Maturity, experience and above all restrained ferocity and creative focus, along with a new batch of extremely high-quality compositions, are crowned by the excellent production of good old Bill Metoyer. That’s why the new Helstar album is incredibly bristling and jagged, and it feels like the heaviest album of Helstar’s career.
The album has just one flaw. It’s at least fifteen minutes too long. Still, you can’t ignore the delightful fact that (immodestly put) “Nosferatu” has been reborn after 27 years!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Awaken Into Darkness
2. Blood Lust
3. To Dust You Will Become
4. Off With His Head
5. From the Pulpit to the Pit
6. To Their Death Beds They Fell
7. Malediction
8. Repent in Fire
9. Abolish the Sun
10. Black Cathedral
11. Dreamless Sleep
Lineup:
James Rivera – vocals
Larry Barragan – guitar
Andrew Atwood – guitar
Garrick Smith bass guitar
Mikey Lewis – drums
