We don't encourage rumor-spreading here (it makes Zodi particularly lock-happy so I'm amazed this thread has gone on as long as it has), so I shouldn't and won't openly encourage that sort of thing going on right here so rexxz is certainly in the right. On the other hand, Frank has shown time and time again that he really does have inside info and seems to personally know friggin' everybody in a metal band in the northeastern US so I don't doubt him for one second when he says that this was the problem and it has been for a long time. He may not be officially associated with the band but if he says that's the deal there's a pretty good chance that that's the case.

If he's right that's fine, but to be honest, not believing every word that a random stranger on the internet says is generally a good principle to have. I don't mean to discredit anyone, but that's just the best way to operate especially when it comes to negative things that are said or implied about individuals.

The other poster appears to have known them since their time in Arizona. I'm personally not best buds with any of them, but I've known them well enough for long enough to know about what goes on behind the scenes, and I can say that if you know any of them even sorta well, you probably have at least a vague idea of how little the rest of them liked his wife and how sick they were of dealing with the same shit on every single tour that she participated in. By the end, the dynamic really was "Dave, Katy, and some other guys". None of them are going to publicly say it and honestly should just be allowed to forget about it, move on with their lives, and do other stuff musically, but I will mention something telling: within a day of that announcement being made, ALL of the now-former members defriended her on FB. I noticed this because she occasionally posts on other people's statuses.

rexxz your internet skepticism is absolutely the correct policy but in this case I'm on the level. I only spoke up because Frank was here with the same information so I didn't look like I was throwing shade for no reason. As he said I know these guys going back to their Arizona days, though I barely ever spoke with Dave. To be fair this does mean I've never heard his side things. However the position of the other three members was explained to me at length while we were chilling before their recent Arizona show.

Yeah, it's best to let the rumors rest - good for everyone involved in the band for being polite about the split.


I do wonder about Earache's shit distribution of their album, though. For years I've seen Earache releases in a number of brick-and-mortar stores like FYE, but this one wasn't in any stores, that I saw. I used to see them in other distros/mailorders, but not this one. At it's release, even the band itself didn't seem to have any copies. The biggest fucking problem was, it was only available from Earache in the USA, and even without wholesaling or actually distributing any copies, it took them weeks to mail out pre-orders, with little acknowledgement to the public that something was horribly fucked up. There was an equal buzz for how great the album was and how hard it was to get.

I guess Earache's jerking off to some emo twink's country side project now instead of distributing metal albums, but I just wanted to say: fuck 'em.

Earache really fucked up the album release and I hope that they don't kill the band the way that they killed all the other thrash acts on their roster who couldn't find new labels fast enough. If I recall correctly, it took over a month for the US to actually get the damn thing; it wasn't just unavailable in brick-and-mortars, but was also listed as an import on Amazon and Earache's own webstore. It's my understanding that they want to get the fuck off Earache as fast as possible, but I don't know if they have a bunch of albums left or something else that would prevent them from signing to a better label that doesn't treat their bands like dog shit.

As for my posting about the split, I barely ever post any more and just wanted to make it clear that it wasn't anything like Dave being a raging egomaniacal despot who rules the band with an iron fist, because trust me, it was anything but. Unless there's something about him that I don't know, he really is just a good, if not kinda quiet and withdrawn guy who happens to have a shitty wife who was a poisonous presence.

I don't understand why anyone's wife has any bearing on the band. Unless she insists on playing tambourine with them or managing them, who cares?

Sometimes you can even play with musicians in your band who are complete jerks, as long as they do what they need to to help the band move forward. Their wife is even less important to the band than that.

Are you serious? I know people that for their partner decided to make radical decisions and drastic changes in their lives and careers.. it's not hard at all to see how a thing like this could happen

This makes me think about Mirai and Mikannibal from Sigh. Mika is a shit vocalist and barely has any saxophone sections to play. She's just there cause she's in a relationship with Mirai, but she's still all over the place. All of their promo pictures involves her, she's always right in the middle of the picture in her eye-candy outfits and she's always center stage when they are performing live. Another occurance of how you can fuck up your music for "love".

Sigh's music hasn't exactly suffered from Mika's presence though. On the contrary, her vocal/saxophone contributions are a intrigal part of their sound now. Just listen to In Somniphobia. Some of the best sections of that album feature her saxophone play and one of their best songs ever (The Transfiguration Fear) wouldn't be half as good without her. For the sake of Sigh let Mirai and Mikannibal be in love forever and ever. That's not to say Sigh wouldn't be good without her as they were already good before she joined, but they're certainly not worse off with her.

Basically the two situations are nothing alike. One seems to be a relationship bearing great creative fruit, the other.... well we don't really know anything beyond that it's not good.

I haven't been a fan of Sigh since she joined, I'll just leave that one alone.

For anyone who doubts what a band member with a bad s/o can do to a band, I've seen at least one band break up because someone had a shitty girlfriend (way worse than Katy will ever be) but was also very good friends with the rest of the band, so they couldn't just say "sorry dude, nothing personal, but you can't seem to separate your personal life from your band life and now you've gotta go" without potentially ruining the friendship. Even if they're not actively trying to butt into band affairs, a bad s/o who is always around, always causing drama, and always refusing to take responsibility for the trouble they've caused and opting to blame everyone else can destroy or irreparably fracture a band if the member in question can't easily be kicked out or is a central figure.

The accusations against Katy are mostly true. She thinks of herself as a manager for the band, but her priorities are for Dave first.

Earache isn't helping things with their shitty record deals.

Anyone who let's their wife manage their band deserves to be abandoned. Has this guy never seen spinal tap or what happened to sepultura?

And this whole myth that you have to be best Bros with your band mates forever in order for things to work is disproved by the highly successful career of slayer

Ultimately it comes down to a band leader who would let things get that bad.

Didn't Tate get kicked out of Queensryche in part because of the growing influence of his wife in the band's management? Conflicts of interest are never good.

I think it's a gross simplification to blame everything on Katy. My impression is that the problem lies with the classic problems arising in bands with a clear leader, ie. issues of entitlement, royalties, credit etc. You can see it in Megadeth, if you read Mustaine's chapters for the golden Friedman/Menza years (and the stories in rehab where the therapeutic serssions with the band members involved getting songwriting credits and more money), you can see it in Death and the tensions between the former bandmates (before Human).

Clearly Vektor is DiSanto's band and vision and clearly the rest of the guys (esp. Erik and Blake) were not just hired guns, so there's the problem right there - because I think that's the heart of the issue. Katy is a *factor* in this in the sense that it's not David and the guys but David and Katy and the guys. Maybe there wouldn't be a difference though, Katy or no Katy, maybe it was the overall vibe the other guys didn't like, I don't know, I haven't spoken to them. Blake and Erik also found mates and maybe those stirred them towards a more drastic stance. At this point we really don't know. I mentioned Katy before because her involvement in the band is known and she posted personally on my newsfeed the opinion of "sole" creative force.

But to make this a Yoko Ono case is just not accurate cause it would mean that there isn't a difference between DiSanto and the others in the first place. There most definitely is, DiSanto writes everything (almost everything?), he is the sci-fi freak, he has had the vision very clearly in his head from day one and he chose the musicians to realize it. I don't know what the perfect balance can be for both parties to be happy and I don't know if such a balance could be possible - and let's not forget that these people were friends who eventually got alienated, which always complicates things.

Anyway, I mostly wrote this because rexxz has a point and I don't think blaming everything on the wife reflects the truth.

I thought he was just kicked because he was being a prima donna.

I think that all of this rumour-slinging is very shady and rather unbecoming of a metal forum. I'm sorry Frank, but I feel compelled to ignore pretty much anything about this situation that doesn't come from an official source. "Random guy from an internet forum" doesn't sound very worthy of my trust, is all.

Yeah no offense, but even if you know the guys personally, I wouldn't draw any real conclusions about this until there's official information out. It's all just speculation right now.

no offense, but frank seems to be the only one around here who has truly grasped the meaning of "post-factual".

"Unbecoming of a metal forum"? We're not talking about Entertainment Weekly here, we're talking about a niche subgenre of extreme music. There's no publicly available hub of info where people can get academically sourced claims about what's going on with members' lives. A lot of claims in the metal scene are going to be anecdotal forever simply because there is no large body of press that documents what occurs. It reminds me of how Wikipedia insists that brutal death metal isn't a subgenre because there are no "third-party sources" documenting it. Do you know of any major newspapers or scientific journals that would EVER be in a position to document the existence of such a thing? But you still know that it exists even though no official "source" has documented it, right?

The fact that the metal scene is so tightly knit and separated from mainstream media means that information is going to spread primarily through word of mouth. And while that means we should be careful in choosing which sources of info to trust (since a single embittered person can change the entire field of discourse), in a case where at least three people with personal connections to the band are going to come forward and all agree that a single person (who had no public reputation before this and as such would be an unlikely target for a smear campaign) is primarily responsible, I'm willing to tentatively believe them.

I agree that spreading rumours should most definitely be frowned upon, but I also think it's a little wishful to think we are going to hear what the real story is at this point. I'm sure if there was something more official going to be said, it would have been said by now.

Do we deserve to know why they broke up? Probably not. But it's also wishful thinking that you can get away without some form of transparency after your band releases a massively well-received album and everyone leaves immediately afterwards.

It would seem that there is at least some basis for both Dave's wife as well as Dave's obvious leader role having contributed to the split-up. That doesn't mean either of them were necessarily in the wrong, just that the other band members didn't exactly like things that way.

Jesus, man, that's not what I meant at all. It's just that this place is generally above things such as rumour-spreading and crap sources such as the aforementioned "random guy from an internet forum". And when I talk about better sources, I mean the actual band members and people more directly affiliated with them, such as their label.

I simply don't think that regular commenters in a thread such as this are owed a whole lot of credibility. If any of the guys who left the band come forward and say "yeah, Dave's wife is a shitty person and she ruined Vektor", then I'll apologize for my incredulity, but until then? No dice.

There is no way anyone with an ounce of integrity would do that. And I really doubt it's that bad anyway. Most probably more along the lines of them just not liking how much sway she has over their band and the leader of said band.

Either that, or they don't want to share, and we should respect that. No more gossip here.