Label: AFM Records
Release date: August 28, 2020
Production: Dean Well
Album length: 59.42 min
Genre: Power Metal/Progressive Metal
Rating: 8.5/10
Vanishing Point are long-running Australian metallers who have always walked the tightrope, balancing straight-up power metal with touches of progressive metal. Look at the year the band formed, 1996, and it’s clear their style drew the most interest in their first era, when bands that had “rediscovered” the musical principle and recycled it in metal were in serious demand. With their second album “Tangled In Dream” (2000), the band even landed a European tour, opening the shows as the first support act for Hamburg’s European power metal legends Gamma Ray. The second support act on that tour was Finland’s Sonata Arctica. But that’s the past, though one we’re tied to by fond memories, especially if you’re among those reading this who found yourselves at Vienna’s Planet Music (now demolished and forgotten) on October 11, 2001.
The band never quite landed the big hit that would win over the wider masses, so its later career shows some seriously long gaps between albums. Add the troubles that plagued the band because of an unstable lineup, and you have to conclude it’s a miracle Vanishing Point are still going at all. Anyway, here it is: the band’s sixth studio album, “Dead Elysium”.
The big asset of today’s Vanishing Point is that the lineup includes two core members of the band’s identity and work, who guarantee its artistic credibility across all the albums, the new one included. They are the excellent vocalist Silvio Massaro and guitarist Chris Porcianko.
“Dead Elysium” is everything you actually expect from Vanishing Point. Yes. Nostalgia included. If you know the band and like them, you won’t waste any more time reading this piece. The band is once again ultra-musical, chasing and developing peaks of atmosphere and bombast in hook-heavy vocal melodies, and the main ringleader of it all is the superb voice of Silvio Massaro, who even after almost 25 years of the band still keeps an extraordinary stamp and punch. He doesn’t push unconditionally into the high registers, but he builds a really likable power, authority and attractive vocal character, which a crossbreed of power and prog metal like Vanishing Point flat-out needs. For comparison, picture a few bands that turn to elements of progressive metal but at the same time bet everything on ultra-musicality and bombast, like Evergrey, Circus Maximus, Pagan’s Mind, Pyramaze, or even later Angel Dust, among others. With the exception of the last one, all of these are Scandinavian bands, and believe me, Vanishing Point sound very “European”, even though they’re Australian. Old-school, by today’s standards even dated, but charmingly traditional, so this album will be checked out above all by those born between 1975 and 1985, who were won over by the band’s early albums.
Up to and including the musically wildly catchy Free, the album runs extremely infectiously, with high dynamic flow and momentum, and it builds a nice variety of ideas. The guitar phrases are properly sharp and jagged, and the album is hard. Production-wise it’s the heaviest album of the band’s career, while the integration of keyboards takes care of contrasting the theatrical drama with the shifting moods. In new member and fellow guitarist James Maier, Chris Porcianko has found an excellent and equal partner, and the album is packed with rustling solo escapades in mid-eight passages and, as mentioned, weighed down with distortion that sounds pleasingly destructive.
In the second half the album “snags itself on prog metal” a few times, which loosens up its rather predictable songwriting a bit, though you’d wish there were more of that kind of experimenting on the new record. But clearly “Dead Elysium” was, first and foremost, a survival test for the band. A test of staying power, or as the wise elder of the Slovenes Primož Trubar would put it: “Stati inu obstati!” (Stand and endure!) Vanishing Point passed that test with “Dead Elysium” with flying colors, in the style of seasoned old hands who were also well equipped with ideas to reach their goal and put together an album that’s a first-rate companion to their older studio achievements. The new Vanishing Point album “Dead Elysium” continues the story from the point where its predecessor “Distant Is The Sun” (2014) ended. Let’s hope the next album won’t take more than three or four years and that the band serves up at least a mild artistic detour. They certainly don’t lack maturity, experience or talent for something like that. Especially given the bold new crew that has found the right bonds and creative chemistry between them. Welcome back home, guys!
Author: Aleš Podbrežnik
Track list:
1. Dead Elysium (7:01)
2. Count Your Days (6:15)
3. To The Wolves (5:56)
4. Salvus (5:16)
5. The Fall (5:21)
6. Free (7:15)
7. Recreate The Impossible (5:58)
8. Shadow World (4:36)
9. The Healing (6:02)
10. The Ocean (6:01)
Lineup:
Silvio Massaro – vocals
Chris Porcianko – guitar, orchestrations, backing vocals
James “Bushy” Maier – guitar
Adrian Alimic – bass guitar
Gaston Chin – bass guitar
Damien Hall – drums
Jennifer Borg (Divine Ascension) – guest vocals
