UMUR "Black Future" is the debut full-length studio album by US thrash metal act Vektor. The album was released through Heavy Artillery Records in November 2009. Vektor formed in 2002 under the Locrian monicker but changed their name to Vektor in 2004. They released the "Nucleus" demo in 2004 and the album length "Demolition" demo in 2006. The "Hunger for Violence" demo was released in 2007, which was the last demo release before the release of "Black Future"

Stylistically Vektor play a technical/progressive type of thrash/speed metal. It´s like listening to the bastard child of Voivod and Destruction. Fast-paced and aggressive thrash metal featuring screaming high pitched vocals. The vocals are obviously loaded with effects and they sound somewhere between Chuck Schuldiner (late in his career) and Schmier from Destruction. Quite frankly they are somewhat of an aquired taste, and personally I think they are a bit hard on the ears and that they are often taken too much to the extreme (a raw sounding Mickey Mouse on helium). It´s of course my subjective opinion of the vocal style, and I´m sure others will enjoy the vocals greatly.

The instrumental part of the music is very well performed and the tracks are generally pretty long (three of them over 10 minutes in length) and features complex structures and many intriguing songwriting ideas. This is certainly progressive music. Featuring 9 tracks and a total playing time of 68:06, "Black Future" is a long album, and maybe also a bit too long for its own good. It´s not that there´s anything on the album which is sub par in quality, but about half way into the album it feels a little like you´re listening to the same stylistic elements being used again and again. The vocals don´t change much, the riffs are pretty similar on all tracks, and the atmosphere doesn´t change much either, despite Vektor´s efforts to include mellow clean guitar sections, instrumental parts, and other adventurous ideas.

"Black Future" features a raw, powerful, and well sounding production, which suits the music perfectly, and upon conclusion it´s a high quality debut album by Vektor, regardless of my personal issues with the album. A 3.5 - 4 star (75%) rating is deserved.

siLLy puPPy VEKTOR successfully delivers an interesting brand of technical thrash metal in the new millennium by fusing the elements of not only the thrash bands that came before but by also incorporating other styles of metal ranging from traditional, death and blackened varieties. They take what they've heard before and progressively blend it all together and hone their virtuosic delivery making one of the more interesting thrash bands i've encountered in quite a while. Although they have been compared to the tech thrash band Voivod and rightfully so, since both their logo and subject matter is similar in the sci-fi world, the music itself does not sound similar.

VEKTOR employ a ruthless and brutal delivery of extreme metal that means business. Quiet and melodic moments occur and when they do they have full command of the slow and melancholy. VEKTOR have mastered the art of progressive rock in all its mood changes and applied it to a thrash metal context, something that is highly demanding and rarely accomplished in such an epic fashion. This is one of those albums that warrants multiple listens both on the lyrical and musical fronts.

There are many 5 star moments on this album but overall there are some parts that drag a little too much for me and keep this from being an outright masterpiece. This is, however, an excellent debut album that I have been trying to get at a reasonable price for some time and now that it has been reprinted and released again it should be a lot easier to acquire. Looking forward to more from this exciting sophisticated band.

Warthur As with the subsequent Outer Isolation, Vektor's Black Future finds the band spicing up their technical thrash metal with influences from black metal here and there. In fact, as the more monochromatic and uninviting cover art suggests, the black metal influence on their music is a little bit more prominent this time around, showing up more not only in the guitar solos but also in some of David Disanto's lead vocals, which tend towards bestial shrieks a little more than on Outer Isolation to my reckoning. Still, what the later album lacks in ferocity it makes up for with polish, which in the case of this particular fusion means it pips Black Future to the post. Jump on this if you really, really love Outer Isolation.

Phonebook Eater 8/10

"Black Future" is a toxic, fast, and catchy beast that emits a cheerfully dystopian light.

Vektor are an American Thrash Metal band: “Black Future” is their third studio length LP. By most of the Thrash community highly praised, this band is unique thanks to their spacey themes and peculiar, Black Metal influenced vocals. “Black Future” is, so far, the album that most faithfully and best represents their attitude and philosophy, becoming one of the best Thrash Metal albums this reviewer has ever heard in recent years.

The thing that you first notice in this colossal album is the clean production, a characteristic that doesn’t usually suit neither Thrash nor Black Metal: but here, it does nothing but compliment the music. The guitars are edgy and loud, the vocals have been mentioned for the most part, except for the fact that they are very varied and different sounding every time; sometimes they’re more like ghostly screams, other times they are raspy and lower pitched. Then the rhythms are pretty standard for the genre, but they are constantly changing, giving a pretty strong technical feel to the compositions. With these characteristics, Vektor play around with some progressive-like structures and mix in some slower, usually guitar driven passages, as well as some futuristic-machinery sound effects.

In most of the lyrics, there is an evident science fiction/dystopian theme, usually of something that has or is dominating earth, physically or psychologically: whether it be nuclear explosions, asteroids, dark nebulas, or genetically modified creatures. Exceptions include “Forests Of Legend”, the narrating of a once fantastic forest, where Giants and massive creatures lived. Anyhow, there’s almost always a sort of changed-as-we-know-it end of our world.

Over an hour long, “Black Future” never manages to bore or to exasperate the listener: the songs are elaborate and complex but not hard to follow. The pillars of the album are definitely the songs that pass the ten minute border: “Forests Of Legend”, “Dark Nebula” and “Accelerating Universe”. Within these ten minutes Vektor bring chaos to earth, as if zombies just came out of a spaceship and are running around,destroying everything they see; they also manage to give some calmer, slower moments within them, making them even more interesting. The remaining six songs however are not less effective: “Asteroid” is fast, catchy, and technical, just like the more Black Metal influenced title track, or “Oblivion”.

An album like no other, “Black Future” is sure the LP that should stick in the minds of Thrash Metal fans for quite some time. This is a great alternative to bands like Metallica and Megadeth; Vektor are a band that perhaps should be learned more of, even by the people who don’t care about Thrash.

Conor Fynes 'Black Future' - Vektor (7/10)

As much as I have attempted to explore it, I cannot say that I have been able to decipher- much less appreciate- the trend of thrash metal. There have certainly been bands in the style that I have greatly enjoyed, but as a whole, I cannot understand thrash's fixation with speed and soloing over what I perceive to be musicality, not to mention the fact that so many of the bands seem content to mirror the existing sounds of the style. On that note, I see a world of potential when the aggression of thrash is melded with more progressive sensibilities. Voivod pulled it off beautifully, and now Vektor- a thrash band from Arizona- is taking thrash and going somewhere interesting with it. True enough, Vektor's debut 'Black Future' is not revolutionizing the sounds of the genre by any degree, but the band's greater depth in their composition makes them one of the best greatest bands in the thrash revival movement.

From their logo and album artwork alone, I get the feeling that Vektor is taking after more classic progressive thrash outfits, most notably Voivod and Toxik. The music generally follows suit with this, although there is certainly a drawn influence from the more straightforward acts like Slayer and Exodus. The music is fast and furious for the most part, relying on riffs that immerse themselves in technical finesse as well as a rawer aggression that I sense often in the style. Balancing this out though is a dynamic, not only from heaviness to softer moments, but also in tempo. Often, the band will go from a blistering foray of furious soloing and likeminded rhythms, and then break down into something more atmospheric and doomy. The fast parts are admittedly fairly generic from an instrumental standpoint, but the fact that these compositions are given more than one-gear speed is enough to make Vektor stand apart from most in my books.

Maybe the best thing about Vektor are the vocals, performed here by David Disanto. Leading Vektor with higher pitched rasps, the sheer range that he is able to take his voice into is astounding. With one moment on the title track coming to mind, Disanto is able to create these vast inhales that sound almost inhuman. I do get the impression that the album goes on a tad too long, and despite the progressive tendencies of the band, some of the songs here do feel as if they thrash along a little past what would have been optimal. All the same, Vektor's 'Black Future' is a very good debut, taking the best parts of thrash metal and making an album that is both intelligent and a hell of a lot of fun.

topofsm In the wake of a sort of resurgence of progressive metal interest, it seems like every band has to outplay each other in terms of technicality. Every band is throwing in weird off-time Meshuggah riffs, a couple minutes of arpeggio sweeps, all within a Dream Threater style epic track.

Then you have Vektor. They put a fresh, progressive spin on old-school thrash metal, with no ostentatious material, no bs, even though there's plenty of technicality. When you hear something like that, you may think Voivod, and while Vektor takes some obvious cues from them, they manage to form a completely original new style of thrash. Not only are they putting plenty of creativity within Black Future, but the riffs are plenty catchy, and there's plenty of emotion within. Black Future may just be a new modern classic.

The most immediate element that sets Black Future apart is David Disanto's shriek, which is pretty unique within the realm of harsh vocals. It's a giant scream that sounds similar to Schuldiner on "The Sound of Perseverance". The songs are thrashy, but they take a bit of tech-prog influence when between the riffs are quick shred licks. The songs are structured in a progressive mold, and work to build the whole rather than the standard song structures.

All the tracks on the album are good, so it's hard to pick a highlight. Some of the most interesting instrumental interplay happens in "Oblivion", which has some neo-classical influence alongside standard uptempo thrash. "Deoxyribonucleic Acid" starts off with a killer tapping riff and continues on blasting. As a prog album, you have to give credit to the epics on the album, where "Forest of Legend" goes from haunting to exhilarating. The final epic on the album, "Accelarating Universe" is hands down one of the most emotional thrash tracks ever, and has some pretty intense tremolo picking and a very spacey bridge.

Overall, Black Future stands out as one of the best albums within the last decade, and may hopefully stand out in the future as a milestone. I certainly feel it is a milestone, and would recommend it to any metalhead. Definitely worth having in your collection.

kluseba Vektor is without a doubt a band with a whole lot of potential. From a technical point of view, they are very talented and also diversified. The problem is that they don't have a quite unique sound and remind me of many other bands.

The first couple of tracks that kick off this record in a rather weak and closed minded pattern have a traditional thrash and black metal vibe that make me think of Slayer or Venom without reaching the originality of these two brands that defined the metal scene thirty years ago or so.

The more progressive tracks as well as many lyrics are clearly influenced by Voivod while the melodic guitar solos have a touch of Iron Maiden. The first great tracks are the calmer and atmospheric songs like the slow and slightly soft experiment "Destroying The Cosmos" or "Forests Of Legend". When the band reaches this kind of quality in the song writing, one doesn't care about the fact that they stole some ideas from here and there but this song is rather a very positive exception on this record. These two tracks are full of breathtaking changes, great melodies and energizing blackened thrash vocals.

The last couple of tracks like "Dark Nebula" are though the best ones on this output make me think of the best works of Absu. The epic final track "Accelerating Universe" never gets too boring in over thirteen minutes of running time and shows the whole creativity of the band. These four tracks leave me wanting more and prove that the strong side of the band is clearly their progressive approach and they just need some time to innovate their very own style in this genre to become a true new legend. The other five tracks are good but definitely not very outstanding in my humble opinion.

This band is inspired by many great artists that all fit together and give this record a great flow but they still fail to invent something new. If you already know the mentioned bands above than the only good reason to check this first strike of the Arizonan band out would be the fact that you really like the genre and want to listen this kind of music and filling a gap while you wait for a new record coming from Absu or Voivod for example. The potential is though definitely there, the album is a grower and I will soon try out the band's brand new second try after this promising discovery.