It too over five painful years to create that book, but that shouldn’t surprise anyone. Author decided to deal with the history of one of the most important groups from Poland, which is a big issue. Of course someone could skip all the details, but would it make any sense? Certainly no. Luckily for us, that bloated book was prepered by true Vader maniac- Jarek Szubrycht, who’s got an opinion of man who takes seriously every challenge he takes. The best proof for it was Slayer’s biography. Collecting all materials needed for Vader’s biography, setting a lot of interviews, goint to tours or finally editing everything in one consistent piece must surely be connected with a titanic work, which consumed a lot of time. But it was worth waiting.  

“Wojna Totalna” is really an interesting lecture. It tells about rises and falls, true passions and all struggles, which band’s leader- Piotr “Peter” Wiwczarek had to defeat. It’s really colorful story which shows us not only a main character, but also times when our underground scene was born. Thanks to that lecture most of readers might know a lot of details, that previously has been known only by some people. An amazing story showing how the dreams can come true, and what’s the real price for that. On 428 pages Jarek wrote (with taking care of every single detail) history, in which everyone can read how everything started and despite of all life’s curves goes till totady, creating the true legend of the band, which as one of the first smashed the Iron Curtain dividing our land and Western part of the world. It was Vader, who was the first band that set the trail for other polish bands to become big names worldwide. It’s also worth mentioning, that the book includes archival interviews with Peter from Eternal Torment, or very interesting interview taken from “Infernal Death”, which tells about non-musical passions of the leader.

Thanks to this book I could recall for a moment times of my youth, when as a teenager hungry for brutal music I greedily absorbed every single information about it, carefoully watching the process of creating our own, native metal scene. That’s why this book is so close to me. It’s a specific travel back into the past, to wonderful, yet very difficult times, when metal gave us strenght toughened strenght of charecters of teenage metal maniacs.

The book was writen in approachable language. Also graphic layout (made by Łukasz Jaszak) is amazing. The only thing I wish to be better is a small number of archival photos. Too bad, that this topic has been treated on a half-way, even if the text is the most important here, a lot of old photos could fulfill that material perfectly. Simple example of it is a similar release, like for example “Heretic’s confession”, where we can see how well it goes together. But let’s not talk about details- the important thing is that we finally can enjoy really interesting VADER biography. Let’s hope, that this book will also find a suitaible publisher in the west, so more readers can enjoy the lecture. Especially that VADER has a lot of maniacs worldwide.
Leszek Wojnicz-Sianożęcki