The mere mention of the term “concept album” is enough to draw skepticism, ire and even audible guffaws from hardened metal purists. However, Anthelion could not have chosen a more metal storyline for their debut full length release, Bloodshed Rebefallen. The songs follow the story of the Snake Corpse, a creature condemned to suffer for thousands of years for trying to tempt mankind.  After millennia spent in agony and enslavement, the beast then reawakens and joins forces with the Snake Tribe, focusing its unlimited wrath on waging war on all creation, and the annihilation of all living things.

Rampancy is a one-man goregrind project helmed by multi-instrumentalist and vocalist Spike, who also plays drums in thrash crossover outfit Bazooka, and plays bass and performs vocal duties in the crust punk band Total Disruption. Behind The Mask…The Massacre, released in 2006, was Rampancy’s first, and thus far only, full-length album, after releasing a demo entitled I Don’t Want to Eat and a three-way split with Bowel Stew and Granulocytic Blastoma in 2005. The sound is pure gore in the vein of bands such as Rompeprop, Dead Infection and porngrinders Cock and Ball Torture. Simplistic guitar riffs are played over programmed bass lines and drum beats that go back and forth between blast beat insanity and mid-tempo groove.

Spit of Hate has a strange promotional strategy. They don't play shows. They don't show their faces. In fact, they are rarely visible within the Taiwanese metal scene. Luckily they have recently resurfaced with more of the stuff their fans have been thirsting for.

Since their initial self-titled album "Spit of Hate," the band has changed their musical direction from industrial/death metal to thrash/death metal. They have also picked up a new lead vocalist. As a fan and concertgoer, I really appreciate their recent artistic innovations. Without a doubt, the band has achieved a whole new level of brutality and sickness.

Soilwork’s world tour in support of their seventh full-length album, Sworn to a Great Divide, brought them to Taipei on Saturday, May 24th. The band’s front man, Bjorn “Speed” Strid, took some time to talk to TaipeiMetal.com before the show about the band’s history, evolving musical direction, and of course, the impact of increasingly severe hangovers as the band gets a little older.

TM: Your name, Soilwork, is a play on words meaning “Working from the ground up.” After more than 10 years as a band, do you still view Soilwork as a band that is working its way from the ground up now that you’ve reached a certain level in the metal world, playing Ozzfest and Wacken Open Air?

Speed: Well, it’s been a long road and I would say that I’m really grateful that we’ve come this far and I definitely think we deserve it. We’ve been working really hard and taking the long road, and it’s been going up small steps for each record up to the seventh album now, and as you mentioned Ozzfest and stuff like that, of course, has been really important to our career. As long as it’s going up and we feel that we have something to say with our music there’s no reason to stop.

Metal music scribes are all, at heart, taxonomists. We study, we categorize, we compare and contrast the varied characteristics of our musical beasts and then finally we place them somewhere amongst the branches of the phylogenetic tree. Knowing precisely where a band fits into this grand evolutionary scheme helps us sleep soundly at night. It saves us from the burden and challenge of actually having to dredge the depths of our creativity to define a band’s style and sound. We listen for the telltale genre indicators—a breakdown denotes hardcore, a breakdown coupled with a blast beat indicates metalcore, guttural vocals and a fixation on bodily fluids would suggest death metal, or perhaps the subspecies gore metal—and we classify a band thusly. But then, a genetic anomaly like Japan’s Blood Stain Child comes along; a musical platypus with bits and pieces that seem to have no business coming together in one animal; a band that spits on every single page of metal’s version of The Origin of the Species. Suddenly we are left bereft of our pre-packaged terms and descriptions. It looks like the aforementioned tree is growing yet another branch.