Review Summary: A perplexing, yet excellent, moment in Anberlin’s history.
Vega might be the singular worst – and most confusing – album rollout in my lifetime. News of Anberlin’s reunion goes all the way back to September 2021, when the band unleashed one of their heaviest (
and best) tracks with ‘Two Graves’. It wasn’t until eleven months later that we received the
Silverline EP. Almost a year following that, the band dropped another EP titled
Convinced – and it seemed that releasing music in this format was going to become their new MO. Fast-forward to 2024, and news breaks that Stephen Christian – who for all intents and purposes
is Anberlin’s core identity – is taking a leave of absence from the band, to be replaced by Memphis May Fire vocalist Matty Mullins. Anberlin quickly turns around with the single ‘Walk Alone’ – a perfectly competent alt-rock song that also happens to sound absolutely
nothing like Anberlin. That was fine at the time, because the assumption was that the Mullins tracks would be singles, or perhaps contribute to a future EP that would kick off the Mullins era. That would have made sense, but instead, Anberlin decided to smash together their two recent EPs with Christian on lead vocals, then add in two token Matty songs, and call it
Vega. Listen, it’s hard to fault Matty Mullins in any of this; to be clear, he has been nothing if not a great sport even amid the fanbase's criticism of him as the replacement vocalist. I’m not sure if the blame rests with the band or with Equal Vision Records, but
Vega has the air of a cash grab – and that’s a real shame, because when you get down to the music itself, this thing had the potential to become both a hugely successful comeback LP
and possibly even their best album outright.
Let’s start with what we know.
Convinced, and especially
Silverline, took the best aspects of the band’s 2014 then swan song
Lowborn and dialed up the aggression. Ever since I first heard the ending to the
original ‘Feel Good Drag’ from 2005’s
Never Take Friendship Personal (not the watered down version from
New Surrender), all I longed for was for the band to rock out like that for an entire full-length album.
Vega is the closest Anberlin has ever come to accomplishing that; everything from Christian’s shouts and screams to the instrumental intensity across the board makes it hands-down their heaviest release and, despite a few ballads, that’s basically front-to-end. Opener ‘Animals’ is brimming with lashing guitars, screamed vocals, and a particularly sinister beat; ‘Decoder’ is a full-throttle headbanger akin to ‘Godspeed’ or ‘Little Tyrants’; ‘Lacerate’ has one of the catchiest (almost danceable) beats, and erupts in all its splendor during that melodic shout-along chorus; ‘Circles’ is an atmospheric whirlwind and blends the dreamiest aspects of
Lowborn with
Vega’s pervading heaviness; and we already covered ‘Two Graves’ and why that song is special in its own right. When Anberlin isn’t dropping sledgehammers, they’re still masterfully blending their signature melodic inclinations with something more powerful and fiery than we’re accustomed to. ‘Nothing Lost’ feels like classic Anberlin but echoes with a sense of rediscovery and newfound purpose (“We didn't come this far, to only come this far”), while ‘Asking’ aims to be a shimmering, gorgeous, and sublime oasis from crippling anxiety (“I want to be the savior to your complex mind / I want to be the quiet in storms”) – and overwhelmingly succeeds. By the time
Vega winds down, we didn’t even need a towering eight minute closer to know that the album would rank among the band’s very best, but we get it anyway with ‘Nothing More’ – which comes replete with a sprawling, poignant saxophone solo. ‘Nothing More’ could be seen as Christian’s swan song – if not the band’s, as it seems Anberlin is primed to continue – and longtime listeners really couldn’t ask for a more moving farewell: “There's nothing more to say…Love you, love you.”
While any fan will hope that Christian returns, in the meanwhile we have two new Matty Mullins-led tracks. ‘Walk Alone’ is the catchier of the two, featuring a true earworm chorus along with a perfectly shoutable post-chorus. It’s your standard radio-ready alt-rock song through and through. ‘Seven’, however, is little more impressive. It’s one of
Vega’s heaviest tracks, thanks in large part to Matty Mullins’ balance between melodic clean vocals and all-out screams, and the song itself also traverses various levels of intensity from the swaying verse “slowly enter the Vega era” to the barrage of drums and guitars that crash over his voice when he elevates it to a scream. Both songs are catchy and well-written – if there’s an issue, it’s that they simply don’t sound like Anberlin songs. Someone who hasn’t kept up with the lineup changes could hear ‘Seven’ or ‘Walk Alone’ and not even know that they’re listening to this band. As a result, the tracks feel woefully out of place on
Vega, which truthfully should have either existed as the two separate EPs or been released an a full-length LP all along.
Anberlin fans will have a lot to digest with the release of
Vega. This is a baffling release on multiple levels, and it fails to capitalize on what should have been a slam-dunk reunion moment. It’s a strange sensation, because the quality content
is there, it’s just scattered across EPs, overlaps across this very LP, and is confounded by the insertion of a replacement vocalist whose work probably should have been honored with its own release. Honestly, Matty Mullins deserves as much – did he not have a say in the way this thing was rolled out either? All in all, there’s a borderline classic Anberlin album to be extracted from this, and it is essentially just
Silverline /
Convinced as a ten song LP. Sometimes the simplest solution really is the best one – a tough lesson for Anberlin to learn at such a crucial moment in their career. Another question looms as well, and perhaps this is the right way to approach this release: in ten years, will we be thinking about this thing’s disastrous rollout, or will we be judging
Vega on its merits as their heaviest and most atmospheric album to date? In that sense, I suppose time will determine the fate of
Vega – a perplexing, yet excellent, moment in Anberlin’s history.
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