The Polish death metal band Vader exists already for some 35 years, founded still behind the iron curtain. They released their debut album in 1992 and celebrate the 25 year anniversary of it with a tour where they play it in its entirety. That is the only album by them that I actually like. So I decided to check them out. The club added two support acts.

The opening act was Seita. A Dutch band I hadn’t heard of even though they already seem to have released two albums. They play death / thrash metal but with a more modern sound. I didn’t really dig the riffs they played, so it quickly bored me. The only interesting parts were the guitar leads which were quite good.

The second band I was familiar with, namely Neocaesar (Or Neo-Sinister). This band consists of only ex-Sinister members including Mike on vocals and Bart on guitar, who were both in the band during the Hate era. Bass player Michel joined shortly after that release, and Drummer Erik sang on Aggressive Measures. Musically, they are not far off from the Hate album. At the start of the gig there were some sound problems, the vocals too loud, the guitar too low, but that got fixed. They have only one album so all the songs they played are from that, including Victims of Deception, Sworn to Hate, where Mike referred to the Hate album of his time in Sinister, Valhalla Rising and they ended the set with the first song they released called From Hell. Very good gig in fact, and a tight performance.

Then the main course obviously was Vader. Dressed in leather and spikes like it was the 80s all over, they came on stage and after the intro started with Dark Age, to fulfil their promise to play the Ultimate Incantation in its entirety. For some reason they didn’t play Reign Carrion (the CD bonus track) which is a shame as I find it the best song of the album along with Dark Age. They played it tightly, although it sounded a bit flatter than on the album, may that is a tuning issue as they downtuned a bit since then. After the album they play some 5 more songs. Pretty solid show, but I guess I’ll never really become a fan.