Vanden Plas
The Seraphic Clockwork

Release Date: 2010 | Tracklist

Among the traits most guaranteed to capture sophisticated musical ears like mine is a concept displaying all traits of a work of genius. Music written specifically to tell an honest, meaningful story will take its shape after the events to unfold, producing a seamless synergy of images and words equal to the finest literature and cinema in its staying power and creative significance. Progressive rock and metal receive unfair generalizations as too dominated by musicianship and pretension, but when what the music is aimed to express is prioritized, these pitfalls are more easily avoided, as while one can receive technical musicianship, lengthy songs, diverse timbres, time/tempo/key/dynamic changes, yada-yada-yada, each of the fifty shades of grey will appear only when necessary, which is exactly when progressive music is strongest. The sixth album from German melodic progressive metal acolytes Vanden Plas is abstractly titled The Seraphic Clockwork, and its ingenious concept combines each of prog’s strengths into a recipe for success.

Like all ground-up conceptually based recordings, The Seraphic Clockwork will spill its secrets only when knowledge of the concept itself is understood and appreciated as part of the journey – and what a journey! The basic setting is a schizophrenic yet inexplicably masterful cross between The Da Vinci Code, Jesus Christ Superstar and The Time Machine: a late Renaissance-era clockmaker named Tio is stricken with apocalyptic visions and traces the cause to an ageless demonic conspiracy that prevented Christ’s betrayal and redemptive crucifixion, rewrote early Christian literature to reflect this, and buried the secret deep within an ancient monastery, meant to be undiscovered until Satan wrests control of the universe. Tio’s prophetic role in orchestrating history’s most pivotal event, however, turns out to be a bitter pill to swallow, only revealed halfway through the album as a time travel mission back to 33 AD to substitute for Judas and trapping him between fulfilling this horrific destiny and the rapidly approaching threshold of Armageddon. Kuntz’s mysterious, arcane lyrics have always personified dramatic, theatrical intensity and spectral religious overtones that helped define Vanden Plas as an entity, and on no other album is his storytelling more existentially resonant or fitting to the musical backdrop.

Vanden Plas has taken obvious leaps in heaviness and progressive structuring on The Seraphic Clockwork, each of which works together to establish the conceptual groundwork; presenting the stakes takes mere milliseconds into the jarring chord sequence of opener Frequency, the dissonance multiplied by drummer Andreas Lill’s restless cymbal and tom accents, Torsten Reichert’s psychotic bass line, and keyboardist Gunter Werno’s atomic synthesizer patches, each performer’s long-honed harmonic skills an essential ingredient in painting moods. Bass drum rolls are followed by a rampaging Symphony X-esque main riff and harmonic arpeggios lead out to a wide-open chorus where the haunting lyrics are spotlighted: “On the day when the sun disappears, then I see the lights in a city of angels”. The straightforward rocker Holes in the Sky is no less epic as guitarist Stephan Lill combines driving power chords and harmonic tension during the chorus riff while Kuntz initiates Tio’s metaphysical quest for the “sonic of truth”, a running theme throughout the album and much of Vanden Plas’ career that plays perfectly into the Germans’ uniquely theatrical take on melodic progressive metal. The third “psalm” as eloquently explained in the booklet deepens theatrical tension by opening with antique piano, violin, and acoustic guitar behind Kuntz’s vulnerable vocals abruptly steamrolled by another blast of distortion, its exotic harmonic structure and alternating time signatures and the guitar tone’s indistinct razor edge seemingly cutting through the very boundaries of space-time with the inexplicable primal energy that drives much of the album; the song introduces Tio’s female guide Mia, the titular “scar of an angel”, meant as the guardian of his salvific mission and hunted throughout by demonic forces to intensify the album’s biblical struggle of ultimate good and evil. A meditative Latin chamber choir answers Kuntz’s chorus phrases on Sound of Blood atop muddy riffing, futuristic keyboard melodies, and an instrumental maze of piano, polymetric cymbal accents, and fluid unisons between guitar, bass, and keyboards as the journey into the depths of that buried monastery turns the album into its darker second act.

Though the preceding songs were without reproach, the aural majesty of The Final Murder is an absolute home run, building from acoustic strumming and Kuntz’s intimate crooning into unsettling clean arpeggios, domineering chords and snare rolls, and the heart of the vile conspiracy against heaven as Werno’s ominous synths burn in the backdrop. A galloping chorus with Petrucci-esque guitar countermelody catapults the listener into a symphonic interlude of clean guitar and violin in the distressing 7/4 meter, a typhoonic guitar solo with Lill’s characteristic spacey phrasing, and walls of chugging guitar and medieval atmosphere. The bridge out of the third chorus is electrified by a gigantic sweeping chord that sounds across the guitar’s scale and commands all the sonic force around it; Kuntz projects his final words into the Empyrean as the juggernaut’s momentum intensifies by adding another phrase and morphing into 5/4, and the pre-chorus theme returns modulated higher with layered piano as if about to ascend into another dimension. When the kick drum picks up and Werno layers a Wagnerian string harmony atop the arrangement, it is precisely that which happens as the music reaches out and grabs me with that same primal energy running throughout the album, awakening images of burning cities as the world looks on and only putting me back to reality during the weeping violin and piano outro. Moments like this testify to The Seraphic Clockwork’s devastating spiritual intensity, a mood that soon resurfaces during the desolate Quicksilver as gravely tolling bells initiate Tio’s archetypal search for Jesus with the still indecisive intention of betrayal; the ornate, metrically unstable introductory piano line is buried by Lill and Reichert’s crescendoing chug, while Werno’s astral Hammond organ blurs the soundscape ahead and the chamber choir returns during the chorus dirge to induce unearthly, spirit-shaking chills as the weight of irrevocable destiny crashes down upon Tio’s soul.

The ebb and flow continues throughout Rush of Silence, between a swirling synthesizer and monstrous main riff, the funky bass during the verses and rousing pre-chorus and choruses, and the baroque classical interlude and the doomy recharge into metal that represent Tio’s deliberation and eventual determination to save the world. The puzzle is solved during the 13-minute finale On My Way to Jerusalem, still caught between last-minute doubts, Tio’s realization that he has come too far, and the fear of his act’s repercussions as it alternates between lounging bass and piano noodling during the verses, the sudden transition into a chorus tinged with understated panic, and an exquisite contrast of modern and ancient drama by matching thrashy guitar riffage, blazing solos, Renaissance-esque bass tapping and harpsichords, and a messy crowd of voices speaking of the Judas kiss. As the song returns to its initial vocal and piano melody with conclusive strings atop, Lill’s snare initiates a sluggish crescendo into a funeral march that finishes the album, in which Kuntz speaks with grave reverence colored with crushed regret while overlooking Christ’s walk down the Via Dolorosa to his crucifixion. The breathtaking power of understatement is the final weapon Vanden Plas deploys, and may be the greatest of all their masterstrokes.

Almost everything about this album screams ingenious, as if its inspiration lies beyond this mortal dimension. The only meaningful flaw is the production, as although the instruments are well-captured and recorded with painstaking detail to match every detail of the album’s atmosphere, the compressed dynamic range flattens out some weight on the bass and drums and causes some frequencies to mesh together during the dense choruses and lead sections. Even this cannot muzzle the amount of creative energy and heart put into this album, notably including Kuntz’s research at Roman holy sites and monasteries, which only arises from a complete personal commitment to music and its meaning; all the necessary proof is how The Seraphic Clockwork metaphysically moved me on a plane rarefied enough as to be life-changing. Appropriately from its subject matter, it is a moment in the time continuum with eternal essence. It is absolutely essential to the fan of melodic progressive metal, or anybody with the slightest interest in conceptual storytelling, and will undoubtedly change how you view each of them through a seraphic process of clockwork.

Originally written for Black Wind Metal

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3.9 excellent

Rank: #0 for 2010