Taipei Metal

Opeth: Playing in the Devil’s Orchard

There’s a tired look about Opeth front man, guitar player, songwriter, and all around metal/progressive rock icon Mikael Akerfeldt tonight. Twenty years deep into a career spent at least partially pandering to interests in extreme metal he developed and largely lost interest in many years ago, he’s finally free to pursue the obscure and involved prog rock stylings he has been chasing for much of his professional life. All that running around and second-guessing can be exhausting. Not to mention the fact that on this night, just a few days into an Asian tour, he and his Opeth cohorts are just a day removed from a show in the Maldives that was moved back a day due to a coup—a first for the mostly Scandinavian quintet. But as Akerfeldt tells it, the coup went much more smoothly for the band than it did for the man now known as the ex-president.

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In Conversation with D. Randall Blythe

If modern metal has a spokesman, there's no better voice for the disenfranchised, the disillusioned, and the downright pissed off than Lamb of God's Randy Blythe. The accidental heavy metal front man, fond of mentioning the fact that he was always meant to be in a punk rock band and, by a combination of circumstance and sheer tenacity, wound up fronting one of the most important so-called New Wave of American Heavy Metal bands of the new millennium, doesn't so much pull his punches as he does let both of his carefully considered fists fly. And with his stalwart band enjoying a near perpetual upswing from album to album, up to and including its latest release, Resolution, Blythe now has an even bigger pulpit from which to let his well thought out and straight from the heart verbal barbs fly. In some circles, people even whisper that Lamb of God has reached the mainstream. After all, the band is on a major label, has toured extensively with one of the biggest names in metal, Metallica, gigged with Judas Priest, and enjoys widespread exposure the likes of which many an underground act can only dream of. Blythe, however, isn't quite sold on the idea that Lamb of God has clawed its way into the collective consciousness.

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Chasma: A Higher State of Mind

Every band from the Pacific Northwest with even the slightest of nods toward the telltale features of black metal must mail out promos of their new albums with acute pangs of dread these days. They know that they are more than likely, by virtue of geographic location alone, going to be lumped together into the so-called Cascadian Black Metal movement by the lazier members of the metal journalistic community, and there’s not a tree hugging thing they can do about it.

Portland, Oregon’s Chasma probably know the feeling all too well. Though certain miniscule parallels between the shoegaze oriented extreme metal three-piece and their backwoods dwelling brethren such as Wolves in the Throne Room and Agalloch can be drawn, Chasma has more in common with elements of post rock and wall of sound merchants such as Isis and Neurosis than it does with what elitists might call true black metal. This alone has caused some within the iron fisted and bullet belted black metal community to get a spiked wristband up their ass about Chasma. How dare they at times abandon black metal’s Satanic, throat bleeding shrieks and blasts for drawn out, layered clean chords and sung passages, aided by the odd indulgence in the occasional all natural mind elevator.

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Destruction: Full Speed Thrash

There are not many thrashers left these days that can genuinely say they've been around to see the genre from its inception through to the present day. But Marcel Schirmer, better known to millions of metal heads around the world as Schmier, bassist and vocalist of seminal German thrash act Destruction, has been there from the beginning. Though the years and the miles keep adding up, Schmier has never allowed Destruction to let old age or the wear and tear of the road slow the band down. Quite the contrary, in fact, as the band, which also includes guitarist Mike Sifringer, the only member to stick with Destruction for its entire existence, and new edition Vaaver on the drums, has included some of its most consistently blistering material in its latest album, Day of Reckoning. Schmier points to the addition of Vaaver, a.k.a. Wawrzyniec Dramowicz, a classically trained musician from Poland who has also done time with the Wachau symphonic orchestra, as the reason behind Destruction's resurgence in the speed department.

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Chthonic: The Final Battle at Sing Ling Temple

The ornate and historic Sing Ling Temple, located on a hillside in the scenic mountain town of Puli in Nantou County, Central Taiwan, played host to Taiwan’s top extreme metal band, Chthonic, this past Saturday. The temple is of special historical significance to Taiwan, as it was the site of a battle between Taiwanese troops and KMT soldiers following the 228 incident, in which many thousands of Taiwanese were massacred by the KMT over 40 years ago. Chthonic has since made the temple, along with local folklore and the Taiwanese fight for recognition of their independence, a central focus of their music and lyrics.

Fans began lining up hours in advance of the concert’s 6:30 p.m. start time, climbing the steep hillside steps leading up to the bright orange thatched roofs and delicate masonry of the temple proper to the staging area just behind it. A film crew, documenting the concert for a future DVD release, lugged hundreds of kilograms of gear, including a large swing-arm camera that dipped and dove over the heads of the fans throughout the show, up the stairs in temperatures that reached an unseasonably high 30 degrees plus.

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Review: Assault - The Exceptions of the Rebellions

Did I miss the Scandinavian invasion of Singapore? Is one of the last few city states in the world now known more for its top-three finishes at elite level hockey tournaments and Nordic event dominance at the Olympics than it is for its vaunted multiculturalism and clean streets? If not, how else could you explain a band like Singapore’s Assault pulling off the melodic death metal sound, forged by the likes of Swedish luminaries such as At the Gates, In Flames, and Dark Tranquility so well?

Assault has well and truly arrived with its first EP, The Exceptions of the Rebellions, a four track effort many years in the making. Featuring great production, not just for an indie release, but genuinely clear, powerful production, blackened, clearly enunciated vocals, and Euro inspired riffs and tone, the mini album kicks off with “Subversion.” The track features the patented harmonized guitar attack during the verse, heavily inspired by the many European melodeath acts that have come before. It’s both catchy and dramatic, with soaring hammer on and pull of solos over a straight ahead, driving hard rock/metal beat.

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Bloodred Fullmoon - Winter Solstice

Taipei-based multi-instrumentalist and all around virtuoso Ray Heberer released a five-song EP entitled Winter Solstice through his Bloodred Fullmoon project in late September. This offering is currently available for free download via Ray’s Bandcamp page. Ray, who is all of 16 years old, is one of those rare people, regardless of a age, of such uncommon talent that actually has the unmitigated drive to match. He currently has at least five bands on the go, and he handles the entirety of the writing and arrangements for all of them. If this is where he is at 16, just imagine where he’ll be at 20, 25, 30, if he chooses to continue with his music. And why wouldn’t he?

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Interview: Abhor - On Esoteric Winds

For the past 15 years plus, Italian self-described “Esoteric Horror Black Metal” band Abhor has gone about maniacally splicing the unexplained elements of mankind's wayward path along the astral plane, occultism, witchcraft, and esotericism with an atmospheric, depressive, and darkly beguiling musical formula that drips from the many disparate branches of the black metal family tree. Though various forces have conspired in the past couple of years to keep Abhor off the stage, the band has nevertheless continued to compose, and has just released it's fifth full length album, the thought provoking and intriguing  Ab Luna Lucenti, Ab Noctua Protecti, a record that, while low on technicality, revels in its slow, simple brand of misanthropy and broad, heady exploration through minimalist but recognizable black metal progressions and layered keyboard atmospherics. Band founder, guitarist, and composer Domine Saevum Gravem spoke to Taipei Metal about the band's history, philosophy, and new album.

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