Author: Rok Klemše
Photos: Aleš Podbrežnik
Location: Ljubljana / Orto bar / Slovenia
Concert date: 01.12.2015
Attendance: 250
The retro thrash flood has been spent for a good year or two now, and it looks like the genre, with a few exceptions, has hit its second cyclical decline. But no worries, a handful of exceptional bands are saving the genre’s honor, and one of them is the thrash equivalent of Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey, the Arizona megalodons of progressive thrash metal Vektor, who in a good ten years have pulled off what few manage – they’ve become a cult act, and deservedly so. On the first day of December, the downstairs room of Orto bar hosted Vektor as part of their very first European tour (before that, Europe had seen them exclusively at Hellfest), and it’s devilishly fitting that Ljubljana got decked out with elements of space, since Vektor are the perfect musical embodiment of it.
Warming things up on the First Contact tour are Dutch thrashers Distillator, but there was precious little warming up, just about as much as the temperature difference between the hall and the outdoors. In a good half hour the Dutchmen dumped nothing but thrash clichés on us: from generic riffs, mostly ideas copied from Slayer (complete with cheesy »Kerry King« solos), all the way to the image with bullet belts and high-tops. Every single song played off the debut Revolutionary Cells was as alike as two peas in a pod, and in that respect anything but revolutionary; only vocalist/guitarist Desecrator pulled off a few nimble-fingered guitar moves, and otherwise the whole thing was incredibly boring and predictable, just like the closing desecration of the Slayer classic Black Magic. This thrash distillation is more stale water than good schnapps.
The Spaniards Angelus Apatrida, old friends of our stages, as vocalist Guillermo reminded us about twenty times, did a few shades better. They came back to us with the new album Hidden Evolution, which they presented in a pretty good light. The guys came across this time as a much tighter and more confident band than in their past appearances, and they were probably fired up even more by the sizable, good-humored crowd. But it quickly turned out that Angelus Apatrida suffer from similar problems as the band before them. The songs quickly started repeating, stale ideas recycled themselves, and toward the end the tracks got so monotonous that they started blending into one another (the only memorable song was the somewhat different Give ‘Em War), and not even Guillermo’s good vocal form could prevent that. You can’t possibly accuse Angelus Apatrida of lacking energy, confidence or tightness, but toward the end we were shifting from foot to foot ever more impatiently, wondering when they’d finally wrap up.
Finally, a little after eleven, the moment arrived, and the packed hall greeted it with rabid enthusiasm. With the ten-minute opening epic Cosmic Cortex alone, Vektor had the same effect as Strauss’s Also Sprach Zaratustra, and in a similar style a good hour and a half of one of this year’s best gigs flew by. Vektor blew people away from the very first notes, instantly set the crowd in motion and into endless moshing, while masterful riffs and phenomenal guitar duels flew in all directions at light speed like in a big bang. The Americans played the ultra-fast parts as if it were a joke, and it was really hard to pick which one of them to focus on, but the most attention was probably stolen by drummer Blake Anderson, who pounded his miniature kit like a hyperactive kid after a huge dose of chocolate cereal and chocolate milk. Even more wonderful in its own way was the interweaving of lines by the brilliant guitar duo DiSanto/Nelson, an evidently inexhaustible source of fantastic ideas, a sort of sum of the best moments of Voivod, Watchtower and Atheist with a strong personal stamp, which after Black Future moved Vektor away from their obvious influences and gave birth to a new, distinctive entity. Besides the cosmic crushers from Black Future and Outer Isolation (with a perfect Tetrastructural Minds!), Vektor also presented three new songs that herald the new album Terminal Redux, and The Cygnus Terminal in particular sounded really promising – it’s clear Vektor haven’t said their last word yet. Despite the pretty long songs, they zipped past us like the Enterprise at warp 10, and the time for the closing Accelerating Universe came far too fast. But the crowd didn’t have to beg Vektor for long, and for the very end they blasted off once more with Asteroid. Minus for Vektor? The almost sold-out merch, where only pygmies and shorties would have found anything for themselves. If I may paraphrase James T. Kirk himself to finish: »Space: the final frontier. These are the voyages of the starhip Vektor. Its mission: to explore strange new worlds, to seek out new life and new civilazations, to boldly go where no band has gone before.«
Setlist
VEKTOR:
1. Cosmic Cortex
2. Deoxyribonucleic Acid
3. Ultimate Artificer
4. Tetrastructural Minds
5. The Cygnus Terminal
6. Black Future
7. Psychotropia
8. Accelerating Universe
— encore —
9. Asteroid
Photo gallery
