Review Summary: By design incapable of wearing out its welcome, Sothis is one of the best iterations of Vader's sound and an impressively advanced and time-durable piece of death metal.
Vader’s eternal issue of producing more of less the same album over and over again has meant that several of their full lengths have felt samey or dull, simply from the wealth of similar tracks they’ve constructed. Vader’s EPs, on the other hand, have generally been a pleasant alternative, inherently incapable of overstaying their welcome and providing too much similar material. Sothis is one of their strongest works as a result, but also benefits from having their best production job prior to 2007’s
Impressions in Blood and some of their best individual tracks.
Sothis was released in the leadup to Vader’s “best album”, 1995’s
De Profundis, which has several of their classic tracks, two of which were already featured here. However, where De Profundis is a cleanly produced but somewhat bland album, Sothis’s production is a lot more characterful and its renditions of tracks like
Vision and the Voice simply have more life. The guitars have more weight, and the drums feel less like they were recorded about a foot away from you and more like they were recorded in the Royal Albert Hall. The guitars are also much more polished and refined than most death metal from the early 90s, and the overall quality of performances is almost miraculously clean.
With only three “real” original tracks in the title track,
Vision and the Voice and
The Wrath, the EP doesn’t have any fat that would require being trimmed in the first place, but the tracks on display are pleasantly varied, with the steady and regimented title track getting the EP off to a simple and clean start. Vader’s core template of relentless trems is undoubtedly a bit predictable, but the track is paced pretty immaculately and very groovy.
Vision and the Voice is the big standout here, an unpredictable, dynamic track with unusual timings and some real tangible melody and sinister tone and atmosphere. In particular, the transition to the twisty bridge and thoroughly evil tremolo picking at around 1:10 is a career standout moment.
The Wrath definitely has more of an old-school vibe, with some NWOBHM/
Show No Mercy vibes and some brilliantly catchy riffs between the typically pulverising Vader staples. All three songs definitely have very distinct characters, which makes you wonder why on most of their LPs there isn’t nearly this much variety… In any case, the closing cover of
Black Sabbath’s, uh,
Black Sabbath, doesn’t pickup the same intimately unsettling atmosphere of the original with the more spacious and weighty production, but offers a bit more of an evil ritualistic vibe. Not the best cover Vader have done by any means, but altogether not a major weak point for the album.
Aside from its rather needless interlude tracks, there is little to complain about on Sothis. With 3 consistently great songs that really work the Vader formula and tropes the best out of their discography, this EP is a significant improvement over their other 90s material and one of their best releases ever.
