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Rating:
A shattered mirror, a now fragmented vision reflecting the disintegration of one of the most influential and seminal metal bands of all time: from the moment you view the cover, you get the impression that the magic, the supreme sonic art that fully permeated the Swiss combo until a few years before the release of this "Vanity/Nemesis," has damnably vanished, incomprehensibly exhausted, as if the creation of that phenomenal masterpiece named "Into the Pandemonium" had somehow drained the dark and visionary creative vein of T.G. Fischer and company.
Just a year after "Cold Lake" (a real creative tomb for our heroes) comes the album under review, as the result of a compromise lineup between the band's golden period, which includes Warrior, Ain, and partly drummer Priestly, and the twilight decline, with yet another "guitar hero" recruited for solos, namely Ron Marks and the tentacular Bryant dividing duties between guitars (including some leads) and bass.
The album presents itself as a belated attempt to regain trust with an audience still reeling from the previous work, thus trying to find hardness, power, and compactness again, attempting to demonstrate once more their art in handling metallic material, with the result of sounding vaguely thrash but never particularly articulated or fast, yet offering a flat version of themselves, devoid of pathos and experimental exuberance, failing to strike ferociously as in the days of "To Mega Therion" nor to astonish with the changing orchestral ferocities of "Into The Pandemonium."
In short, the songwriting, the pretense of stuffing each song with overflowing and forcibly American-school leads, the riffing (not the poses and the look), everything remains fatalistically anchored to the previous album, which, you understand, does not represent anything positive.
The confusion (not just of the lineup) and inconclusiveness reigning in the group at the time of composing and recording the disc in question are clearly felt: devoid of decidedly emotional cues, the work drags on, throughout its entire duration, powerful but elephantine and monotonous, except for the gothic song "Wings of Solitude" (indeed the only track composed entirely by the good Tomas), where the voice of guest Michele Amar intertwines with a metallic texture that makes everything sensual and brutally heavy, the successful and funereal cover of "This Island Earth" by Bryan Ferry, and the semi-title track "Nemesis", moving in reprising as an introduction and ending the desperate screams present as the opening incipit of "Into the Crypts of Rays" in "Morbid Tales" and still fairly well constructed around an initially touching arpeggio to then evolve into a rocky song with a morbid chorus, which concludes the album and marks the sad end of the career (the first and most important portion of their career) of the Swiss combo.
To forget is the unpresentable revisitation of the seventies classic "Heroes" by David Bowie, really distorted and overly metal-oriented, where they failed to preserve the intimate fragility of the original piece.
Someone might argue that pieces such as the opener "The Heart Beneath" or "The Name of my Bride" are still well-constructed and have more than decent riffing and that ultimately, weighing all the individual elements and the various songs, the album appears more than acceptable: well, this is exactly the problem, here we're not philosophizing about one of the millions of metal bands present on planet Earth, here we're talking about Celtic Frost and this involves the assumption of compositional and qualitative standards, with related judgment metrics, that for others have no reason to be.
Ultimately, "Vanity/Nemesis" appears to me as the sad document of a band that tried to regroup after a problematic period and that frantically sought to achieve the artistic goal, realizing in the process that such effort inadvertently led to the sad end of a career already fatally compromised with the previous "Cold Lake."
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