Vektor // Haken

Possibly the most hotly anticipated release of the year, Arizona-based Vektor has quickly ascended to the top of the rethrash heap, fueled by their deep space flavored blend of blackened prog-death-thrash. Terminal Redux fills its disc up with a hefty runtime of 73:21, offering these boys plenty of rope to hang themselves with only for them to burn down the gallows and piss on the ashes: Vektor's engines are burning at full power from the opening crush of "Charging the Void" and they don't let up for a good 40 minutes before we get a respite with the cosmic melancholy of "Collapse" before burning up in the atmosphere with "Recharging the Void". Crafty writing ensures that you're never more than a couple of minutes away from a more melodic passage to snap things back on course while nearly every song has something special to demarcate it: from the planet-sized groove of "Pteropticon", "Pillars of Sand"'s careening bleakness, to the chunky sci-fi of "Psychotropia" nearly every song contributes to the album's narrative while standing out as fantastic blackened thrash in it's own right. Add a dash of spaced-out choir vocals on the bookend tracks and you have Peter Watts in space - a heady twist of the depressing limits of human life mixed with the untold possibilities of the cosmos.

B+

I can't remember the last time I flip flopped my opinion on an album this hard. Upon it's release I considered Affinity one of Haken's least interesting works, featuring boring songwriting and flat production - pretty much the opposite of what I consider it to be at this point. I do still have some problems with the production, but it wasn't enough to keep this album from basically living in my car the last 2 months. While it doesn't quite reach the same heights as The Mountain did it comes damn close: "1985", "Earthrise", "Lapse", and "Bound by Gravity" are all absolute gems and even at the low points ("Initiate", "The Endless Knot") the album flows by a noticeably faster pace than their previous work, making for a 61 minute-long album that seems much shorter than it should. Well-layered lyrics paint a vibrant picture of the rise of artificial intelligence, the arcane workings of the human mind, and the aftermath of the sun's eventual death, while some of the band's most focused and powerful songwriting and album design (credit goes to the fantastic Blacklake Design for knocking this out of the park just as hard as they did The Mountain) seals the deal. Affinity proves that The Mountain wasn't just a fluke as the band moves forward, each album stronger than the last, into the future.

B+