Vendel’s full length debut Out in the Fields is the type of album that creates a bit of a headache in terms of giving it a truly accurate description, and yours truly has certainly struggled a bit with how, exactly, to do justice to all the goodness happening across these 50-plus minutes. A convenient approach would be to compare the band to Russian legends Scald, as Vendel plays metal that is similarly both doomy and epic, and Vendel is also Russian. But that’s just lazy, because there’s far more going on here, and before we dig into exactly how Vendel blends their various trad metal influences, we should focus on exactly what all these influences have in common: sheer size.
So Vendel ain’t exactly making quaint, intimate music here, folks, a fact hammered down as soon as that aforementioned intro really gets going. The ensuing “Defender” lays out Vendel’s various tools: seriously neck-wrecking riffs at various speeds, drumming that rolls and tings and pounds and generally meets every moment, duel leads and solos that rock hard as much as they meet the narrative moment, and a vocalist that brings a ton of personality and chops without ever getting into real histrionics (even when he’s wailing out a wicked great falsetto). And yes, it’s all rather massive ‒ excuse the obvious thesaurus use to add variety to the description of all the ways this album is enormous ‒ particularly as it leads to a series of WOAHs and an extremely Maideny finish.
Other tracks maintain the scope and scale with each offering a slight twist in terms of vibe, keeping things quite fresh both within each song and across the whole of the album. “Never Surrender” has a killer gallop to the chorus, while singer Alexey Goryachev offers a delightfully Dickinsonian cadence to his delivery, albeit with a bit more theatricality. It also gets closer to old school power metal than about anywhere else on the record, or at least power-leaning trad; think the roaring triumph of bands like Visigoth.
Out in the Fields fittingly reaches its greatest heights towards the end, because when you’re going big, you don’t want to flub the landing, right? Penultimate track “Vengeance” is both the longest at over 13 minutes and by far the doomiest, sometimes carrying an almost sorrowful mood while Goryachev ups the emotion (by sounding more than a bit like Butch Balich of Argus), and at other times using a simple and extremely heavy riff pattern to get downright mean under a series of leads and solos. The closing title track then ups the ante on basically everything Vendel had done previously on the album, especially the thunderously thundering THUNDER of it all. This is heard in The Ultimate Gallop and great hook early on, a more bellowing vocal approach, absolutely colossal chorus that you’ll be singing before the tune is even halfway over, a big tempo shift to doom (even the transitions are immense), and a falsetto scream towards the end that puts a killer bow on the whole thing. That scream also adds another wrinkle to Goryachev’s great vocal performance, because you’ll swear you sense the spirit of the late David Wayne in that moment.
Vendel pulls from more places than initially seems apparent, and those sources fittingly come across in ways you might not hear after just a couple spins. Out in the Fields is therefore a little deeper than you might expect from an album based entirely in older, more traditional forms of heavy metal. But genre tags and influences aside, this album will absolutely thrill fans of big, bombastic heavy metal that prefer to have their heavy metal be big and bombastic. Raise a sword, a stein, your fists, whatever, but mostly get off your arse and listen to this tremendously towering and magnificently massive piece of serious heavy metal thunder.
