Rarely have I been impressed by an unknown group on the first listen.
VAST, Visual Audio Sensory Theater is an ambitious name for an ambitious project. Imagine the impossible marriage of Dead Can Dance with the somber industrial sounds of Killing Joke. VAST unexpectedly thrives, mixing antagonistic styles with success. The album Visual Audio Sensory Theater is a clever blend of electric and acoustic guitars, samples of Gregorian chants and from the group Le Mystère des Voix Bulgares, electronic rhythms, and threatening vocals. And the alchemy is a total success, as the singles Touched & Pretty When You Cry bear witness to melodic mysticism.
Whereas I had abandoned listening to guitar bands a good time ago, particularly because of the saturation of waves of metal bands as fine and melodic as the humming of the motor on a redneck pickup (Korn and, disturbingly, Vanilla Ice at helm of the skater-mongoloid metal movement), VAST arrived just in time to give me hope that maybe rock will be saved from the swamp it sank into by a fistful of technological chemists.
Vast Visual Audio Sensory Theater
