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Vektor made a splash back in 2009 with their debut Black Future, which married technical Thrash reminiscent of Anacrusis with a dystopian Sci-Fi vision akin to the bizarre landscapes of Voivod's early work. They followed in 2011 with Outer Isolation, which didn't make much of an impression on me, and now we have their third disc in Terminal Redux, their debut for Earache records.

Vektor have been growing more technical and melodic with every album, downplaying more and more of the aggression that made their debut sound so vicious. While I can tell this is the direction they want to go in, I don't like it as much. The songwriting here seems much more contrived, with the chaos sounding calculated rather than fevered. In a lot of places, they break into genuinely bad melodic interludes that yank you right out of the mood. In their early works Vektor could be sprawling and intricate without losing the thread of their compositions, but here they have not managed to do that. The songs are baggy and too loose, and the riffs and leads are more showy than involving.

This is an album where you never know what is going to happen next, but while on Black Future you wanted to know, here you kind of dread it, and the songs lose too much focus and just become blurs of noise and yammering. Even on repeated listens, this album refuses to cohere and become addictive or fun in almost any way. Disappointing.