DON FELDER – The Vault – Fifty Years Of Music – Album Review

20th May 2025 0 By Jon Deaux

Teeth in velvet. A vault without hinges. You’re listening through ash. Not playback—relapse.

It begins somewhere between the tremble of an open chord and the hiss of old oxide. Not Move On—no track names here. Just the first incision. Tape flickers. Pulse stutters. Guitars coil like old snakes moulting their skin in sun-bleached motel rooms. This isn’t rock. It’s a slow extraction. Fifty years of blood in the teeth of magnetic ribbon.

The studio ghosts of David Paich, Steve Lukather, Joseph “Joe” Williams, and Greg Phillinganes of Toto. You’ll hear their fingers like raindrops in the dark. Drums crack like torn vinyl under heels. Nina Winter was breathing through a slit in the curtain. Lenny Castro scrapes bone with brushed steel.

And still, the shine. Polished like a mirror in a padded cell. Professionals, yes. God-tier session phantoms with gold-plated fingers. But listen closely—beneath the finish, dust. There’s rust in the reverb. Regret in the sustain. Guitar strings fray mid-bend, and no one reaches out to stop it.

Some tracks speak. Some twitch. One growled at me in the night.

A lyric about dancing girls folds itself into an apology from 1987. It doesn’t matter. Linear time has been disbanded. Felder remembers riffs that no longer exist and plays them into place. The solos aren’t flashy. They feel like handwriting on a hospital form. Smooth. Shaky. Ink running out.

“Digital World” comes on like a virus. Lukather slices the mainframe. We dance in zeroes, bleeding in stereo. A synth climbs a ladder that isn’t there.

The re-recorded “Heavy Metal” isn’t nostalgic. It’s posthumous. The corpse of a song, taxidermied with chrome and fresh rage. It still flies. But differently. Like something on fire.

Then the ballads. Not gentle. Not soft. Just tired of bleeding loudly. “Let Me Down Easy” feels like a call from someone who doesn’t know what year it is. A love song from a bunker.

The vocals are weathered. Frayed. More message than melody. Like voice memos sent from inside the mixing board. You hear the decades in his throat: contracts, silence, echo chambers.

If this album had a smell, it’d be melted laminate and unwashed denim. If it had a face, it wouldn’t look at you.

And if you ask, “Is it good?” —I’ll say this:

It happened.

It’s real.

It won’t leave your headphones. Even after you’ve turned them off.
Score 8/10

Tracklist:
1. Move On
2. Free At Last
3. Hollywood Victim
4. Last All Night
5. Digital World
6. I Like The Things You Do
7. All Girls Love To Dance
8. Together Forever
9. Heavy Metal
10. Let Me Down Easy
11. Blue Skies
Label: Frontiers Music s.r.l.