| | Vast |  | Creator: Disaffected
Label: Skyfall Records
Category: Music
This item is no longer available
Avg. Customer Rating:  1 reviews
Sales Rank: 741120
Format: Import
Media: Audio CD
Discs: 1
UPC: 560289602789
EAN: 0560289602789
ASIN: B000FEZUAQ
Publication Date: 1995
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| Customer Reviews:
Well Worth Tracking Down October 13, 2006
Regional 'scenes' have been both a boon and a bane to metal. On more than one occasion, the emergence of a new scene has served to shake the genre out of a creative malaise: NWOBHM in the early 80s, Tampa at the end of the decade and the Norwegian black metal explosion of the early 90s, to name but a few. Local scenes serve as creative catalysts and artistic incubators, as well as vectors for renewal and evolution.
On the other hand, the intense focus on certain scenes has often served to undermine the overall quality of metal as a genre: in the rush to sign bands from 'hot' scenes, many inferior acts with the right local pedigree are signed, while superior acts without the 'brand' recognition languish in obscurity on tiny (and often shady) labels with no distribution muscle, or remain unsigned entirely. The list of criminally underrated death metal bands who lost out in the early and mid 1990s as the major metal labels snapped up any and all bands from Tampa, New York and Sweden is particularly extensive, headlined by the likes of Demilich, Demigod, Lemming Project, Necrophiliac, Wicked Innocence, Creepmime and many others. Well, here's another band to add to that list.
By the time of Vast, their one and only full-length release, Disaffected was a band with many assets: an easy if often jaw dropping technical precision, an unerring instinct for unsettling yet beautiful melodies, and a unique compositional approach that was at once daringly, esoterically complex and at the same time direct enough to be accessible on one or two spins. Unfortunately, in metal as in real estate, the watchword is often "location, location, location!" : Disaffected hailed from Portugal, far from the Swedish and American centers of the death metal universe and well out of the scene-fixated sight of the metal majors. In the days before the rise of the internet, being signed to a tiny label like Skyfall Records was essentially a career death sentence, and Vast was to be the band's last release.
This was a shame, because Vast is a brilliant record. At its core, Vast succeeds as a fusion of the melodic, doom-laden European approach to death metal and the more harmonically dense and percussively explosive American style. It should be understood, however, that this is merely a point of departure, and Disaffected's work cannot be understood solely, or even primarily in these terms. Rather than being a simple exercise in recombinance, Vast instead represents a cunning unification of several generations of theory and technique into a single unique vision.
As a work of art, Vast relies on a dislocating atmosphere of tension that invokes the struggle between the timeless will to be and become and the disillusionment inherent in the fragmented 'reality' of a modern existence rendered meaningless by its own plasticity. This tension is created and maintained by the integration and juxtaposition of seemingly disparate elements: pensive ambient moments of near silence are shattered by thundering bursts of staccato riffing and jarring harmonic intervals that wouldn't seem out of place on Unquestionable Presence give way to open, almost orchestral passages full of flowing melodies, fluid, classically tinged lead work and rich keyboard shadings before resolving into quietude or dissolving once more into atonality. The vocal attack is quite varied for death metal, running the gamut from a hoarse whisper to a more conventional growl, with more guttural moments occasionally intruding (and, even a touch of Cynic-style vocal processing). Structurally, Vast provides more of the same, as its broadly narrative passages are frequently subverted by elliptical self-referentiality.
Some will, of course, find the inherently dramatic and 'theatrical' nature of its presentation to be 'cheesy,' but this doesn't reflect any fault on the part of Vast, but rather stands as a monument to the smallness of our own age. Those who dare to dream will find a work of genius that is by turns challenging, assaultive and beautiful, an album that falls short of perfection only in its inclusion of an Acheron cover as its closing track (there's nothing inherently wrong with the cover itself, but it serves as a major letdown in the wake of the magic of the band's original material).
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