Festivale de Football Day 20: Poland

It's finally come to it. I have to post death metal. Actually, I don't have to, as Poland has a surprisingly rich variety of music. But rock is the thing, rock music outstrips pop in sales, charts and radio airtime, rock is where it's at.

And in a kind of a way, no band has made as much impact as Vader. Of course, in real terms - album sales within or outside Poland, chart positions etc. - then certainly there's more successful acts. But if we're talking critical acclaim or international impact relative to a scene, then Vader are huge.

To be honest, I picked the name from Wikipedia's list of Polish acts as the only one I'd heard of, which I guess is a fair indicator in itself. The name was familiar from my Kerrang!-reading days (don't scoff like you never went through your rock phase), so exploring I went.

Turns out Vader are a pretty big deal in the extreme metal world. Now, I'm not as familiar as I could be about the distinctions between different sub-genres of metal, but I'm going to stick with death metal - there's insufficient keyboard-soaked grandeur to be black metal, the vocals are too distinct to be grindcore... You see where I'm going, they tick all the boxes. Sound? tick. Looks? Long, coiffeured hair and uniform black: tick. Lyrical nonsense? tick.

The last is an interesting point. To what extent the band hold with some of the tenets in their own songs is not known, but they stick to the slightly satanic, archaic and ornate style of their peers - however, the word nonsense was not used indiscriminately. Check out their lyrics page:

"Across the city that keeps shifting
Spectral bicycles speed and ride
The fog devours and spits
New geography of the mind
Prostitution in memories
Secret desires without redemption
The past implodes on itself
The return to the womb begins"

Anyone? Me neither.

But anyhow, this is what death metal types do - to be fair, I've heard just as ridiculous lyrics in most genres you could care to name. Onto the music though: fairly fearful drum work, as you'd expect. If you've never seen someone doing blastbeats in person, then try and get a chance, it's positively frightening.

I'm going to post three tracks: Vicious Circle is from Vader's record-selling demo Morbid Reich and features their trademark extreme sound. Firebringer is from their last full album proper, The Beast. Raining Blood is, of course, a Slayer cover, this time in a live setting. I was going to post a corporation disclaimer, opinions reflected here do not neccessarily represent those of the author etc., but I find it so hard to take these people seriously, I don't think it's a problem...

Vader - Vicious Circle
Vader - Firebringer
Vader - Raining Blood

Buy Polish music here
Buy Vader

Tags: Poland; World Cup; metal; death metal; Vader; Slayer

CIA Factbook: Poland