Label: Frontiers Music Srl.
Release date: 11.10.2019
Production: Markus Teske
Album length: 46.34 min
Genre: Progressive Metal
Rating: 9.0 / 10
Vanden Plas, the long-running progressive metallers from the German city of Karlsruhe, remain one of Germany’s best-kept musical secrets. The band has roots reaching back to the second half of the eighties and an excellent debut, »Colour Temple« (1994), with which Vanden Plas immediately staked out their own distinctive artistic identity. They’ve been going from day one, and to this day with an unchanged lineup, which is a major guarantee of healthy, continuous artistic growth and consistent quality. Over the years the quintet has always nurtured its own musical character and kept maturing artistically, album after album.
The band has also always loved tackling themes where logical empiricism (science) and the mystery of paranormal phenomena join hands, creating some seriously ambitious works. Whenever you talk about »progressive metal excellence from the first-generation school of the genre«, where they slot in easily, you get concepts that are every bit as complex, with stories stretched across more than one album.
After a break of a few years, the band is back with a new release that once again wrestles with the search for universal justice (let’s be honest, in the real world justice is a complete illusion, unless there’s still some corner of this planet left that the corrupted foot of the human world hasn’t trampled yet). Once again it’s a concrete story, a battle between »good and evil« that the band says it plans to wrap up only on the next album. So, part two. Right now we’ve got part one in front of us, called »The Ghost Experiment – Awakening« (part two is supposed to be called »The Ghost Xperiment – Illumination« and is announced for next year).
The band’s ninth studio effort once again carries a complex concept, where the worlds of fantasy and science fiction join hands. The main character is Gideon Grace, who has to keep standing up to the shadows of the »house of rain« while he »wanders« around France. The man is full of sorrow over the loss of his beloved partner Ivy, and his pain is at once the engine of the will and perseverance with which he stands up to the demons. When he discovers, in an old library in the middle of Germany, more precisely in the German school of metaphysics, works built on parapsychological experiments, he expands his knowledge and consciousness, which he later uses in the fight against the creatures of darkness. When he faces them for the first time, his tears during the battle cause a deep abyss to open on the road to hell…. And that’s how the first part of this new conceptual story ends. Why France again in the story? The band has always had incredible fan support there, so maybe that’s the reason for the choice.
And the music? Progressive metal from head to toe, made strictly to the German recipe (the Dream Theater inspiration is of course noticeable, since they’re practically generational peers). The guitars are pointed and sharply honed in the production, the guitar phrases pushed way up front, with rustling curtains of complex and varied keyboard work holding down the backdrop, leaning heavily on neoclassical touches and orchestral arrangements. From eighties-style synth sounds, which widen the sonic landscape from behind the sharp phrasing, to classical piano in the calmer parts and transitional passages. There’s the outstanding singing of the piercing, instantly recognizable Andy Kuntz, and of course the brilliant kinetics of the well-oiled machine that is the rhythm section, which looks after a vivid refraction of rhythms through richly structured transitional passages. As this band’s proven recipe has long made clear, Vanden Plas are exactly what Dream Theater never knew how to be (or never wanted to be). There’s an exceptional bond between virtuosic arrangement complexity and musical catchiness, which generates a greedy dose of pomp and bombast in vivid shifts of crafted moods. This time is no different. The band has packed all their creative virtues, with their insightful and very own artistry, into yet another top-quality achievement that every devoted fan of this too-often-overlooked band will worship flawlessly and unconditionally.
The chemistry is once again outstanding. The quintet’s camaraderie works fascinatingly in performance, composing and the way they read each other, and it’s a textbook example, literally. The most combustible points, let’s call them the ones that hit hardest through the chosen lead motif and vocal melody (the chorus), are the opener Cold December Night (the opening riff unfolds as if lifted from the band’s first three albums) and especially the closing title track, whose bombast building up inside the chorus could easily have found a place on any of the Vanden Plas albums released in the nineties. Among the more heavily progressive tracks, namely Three Ghosts, Devil’s Poetry and Fall From The Skies, the chorus in Fall From The Skies takes first place for catchiness of the vocal hooks. Vanden Plas craft their music by building, over the course of a song, a graduated theater of drama that culminates in a crescendo inside a bombastic chorus, or reaches a similar effect through a (real) tangle of vivid solos, which, backed by Günter Werno’s broad arsenal of keyboards, are the work of the outstanding guitarist Stephan Lill. In this respect it’s still worth pointing out that on the new record Vanden Plas have somewhat »simplified« the arrangements. That means the guitar phrases are more exposed, as are the chorus melodies, and there are more shorter tracks too, which leads us to the realization that »The Ghost Experiment – Awakening« comes close in vibe and energy to the very roots of the band’s music-making in the nineties, which was much harder to claim for their previous three studio efforts.
The album »The Ghost Experiment – Awakening« is exactly what you expect from Vanden Plas. The audience that follows them certainly isn’t huge, but alongside great devotion it’s also extremely demanding and really very musically spoiled. And Vanden Plas have once again delivered a new, excellent, if not downright brilliant, achievement, which, let’s be honest, you could quietly expect!
author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Cold December Night
2. The Phantoms Of Prends-Toi-Gardes
3. Three Ghosts
4. Devils´ Poetry
5. Fall From The Skies
6. The Ghost Xperiment
Lineup:
Andy Kuntz – vocals
Stephan Lill – guitar
Günter Werno – keyboards
Andreas Lill – drums
Torsten Reichert – bass guitar
