Vader - Tibi Et Igni (2014) (Ltd.Ed. Digipak)

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Vader - Tibi Et Igni (2014) (Ltd.Ed. Digipak)

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Vader’s integrity remains intact on their newest album Tibi et Igni. After over 20 years of doing this shit, you’d think they would have lost some steam – but nope, they’re chugging along like a goddamned locomotive from Hell driven by a drunk, belligerent and pissed off Beelzebub with a can of Texas Driver in one hand and a machine gun at his side for any victims who may by chance get out of the locomotive’s path.

In terms of songwriting, this listens like any other Vader album, replete with chugging, flailing guitars and Piotr’s commanding, savage and yet intelligible bellowing – there’s really no other band like Vader on the scene, and here they continue along just sort of carving their own little niche in stone – each album I hear from them gets more iconoclastic and unique to the genre. Songs like “Go to Hell” and the horns-throwing thrash of “Triumph of Death” are among the more standard numbers on here – while they’re good, the album has more engaging picks in its stockpile of mass-destructive weaponry. “Hexenkessel” is a massive chugging thrash-fest with propulsive, involved riffing and energy through the roof. “Worms of Eden” starts off with a cornucopia of guitar leads diving down into the chasm of hellish riffing the band throws at us – a career-defining song that pretty much sums up the band in a three-minute nutshell. “The Eye of the Abyss” is up there with the best tracks Vader has ever done with its epic song structure and killer riffs. “Light Reaper,” following that, is the fastest and most balls-out track on the whole album – a killer fucking tune.

This album features a heightened thrash influence on Vader’s usual brand of chugging, war-hammer death metal, but really it’s just in the aesthetics – for Vader has always pretty much been a big old cauldron of heavy, thrash and death influences, but here those influences are more pronounced due to the cleaner production and the influx of epic orchestral flourishes here and there – which only accentuate the head-smashing riffage; they do not detract or neuter it. The production isn’t as heavy or thick as some of their old albums, but its brighter sound adds some clarity to the sound that wasn’t there before, and you can hear every inch of them kicking your ass with their nimble, aggressive guitar attack.

The alchemical melding of heavy metal, thrash metal and death metal makes this sound incredibly individual despite the band pretty much doing the same thing on every album. They know what’s good about metal – its tried-and-true dedication to the classic sounds. You don’t have to innovate; you just have to find a way to make the influences sound good and fresh again, and sell those influences with aplomb and theatricality in spades – that’s what metal is about in the end. Vader have mined the well and found this secret, and are milking the fuck out of it.

By doing so, they reinforce the strengths of metal on a larger plane – its dedication to the obscure and the arcane and the way it never quite goes out of style, plugging on for years and years with no buckling to trends at all. The way a band like this, around for over 20 years now, can consistently release great material that never deviates from their hellish vision, is a testament to what’s great about metal as a whole. No other genre could pull something like this off. For that Vader is a national treasure – go get this album and revel in their Satanic might.

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