Review: Seediq Bale

Apparently this was the album that made Chthonic known outside of Taiwan, and I can see why. I did have to listen to it a few times though, just because I'd heard their most recent one (Mirror of Retribution) first and that was so good. Inevitably I've had to compare it to that one. Seediq Bale by Chthonic The mix not quite as good as Mirror..., it sounds flatter, the drum sound in particular has less depth, but since this record recording technology has got better and they've got more money so it's understandable. It's nowhere near as bad as traditonal tin shed raw black metal, which is good because that only sounds good for a handful of bands and painful for the rest. There's alo more tremolo picking than on the other record, and also more gothenburgish guitar riffs too, kind of half-way between death and black metal. The erhu is not so prominent either, and not so eastern sounding, kind of just follows the keyboards. The latter uses a piano and harpsichord effect alot which undermines oriental feel a little, and I suppose justifies Cradle of Filth comparisons more. There are more female vocals apparently from a famous Taiwanese pop singer, giving it a more gothic edge, while the metal vocals are a bit further down in the mix, but still don't sound Danny Filthish to me - maybe when he sings in English, since again I have the Taiwanese version rather than the international one.  I can't comment much on the lyrics, as my edition has some lyrics in Chinese and some in what I'm told is one of the aboriginal languages of Taiwan, but I assume it has something to do with aboriginal folklore and their historical struggles. Seediq Bale has a different feel to Mirror..., it's not as violent and unrelenting, sometimes not quite reaching the climax you expect, though it gives the whole album a kind of driving, sinister, brooding tone. Song structures are more fluid, more black metal if you will, so it works really well as a whole album but doesn't really have standout tracks as such - no duds either though. Here's a brief rundown of my favourites though: Indigenous Laceration - not too fast, has a good riff and solo, and one of the best song names ever Enthrone - short little song, but not instrumental Bloody Gaya Fulfilled - good riffage and keyboard stuff, solo's pretty awesome too Where the Utux Ancestors Wait - good atmospheric song Banished Into Death - really good riff and atmosphere, even has a good solo, possibly my favourite song on the album... unless this next one is Quasi Putrefaction - with an awesome metal name, good build up, riffs, and structure, it's an excellent closing track. So Mirror of Retribution didn't just come out of nowhere, this is a really solid black metal album. And before I finish this review, I have to mention the cover. I don't know if it comes in a standard CD format, only the digipack was available in Taiwan, but it's definitely worth getting the digipack or better still a vinyl edition if it exists just for cover design. Beautifully drawn with gold lettering, and the old, more traditionally black metal Chthonic logo, but not nearly so much of a metal cliché as most covers you get. This kind of design makes it worth getting a physical version even if you can find a top quality digital one.

Review: Mirror of Retribution

Chthonic's most recent album, released last year was the first of theirs that I heard (I was at an album launch in Kaohsiung where I bought it), and I was impressed. Small towns in England have larger metal scene than Taiwan, but this was no amateurish clone bands record. I'll attempt to give you an impression of it starting from the outside and working inwards.

The packaging of mine, the Taiwanese digipack issue, is a nice dark blue, with characters that look suitably brutal as if painted with blood, though sadly they seem to have ditched their necro-black metal logo for a more legible one. Bound hands fill the front, looking battered and possibly dead, like those of a prisoner tortured to death, no doubt to symbolise something from the theme of the album (which I'll get to later). On the back with a sky all dark and brooding is a scene that in the colours and to those outside Taiwan might look rather barren with a ruined house, but this is actually quite a typically Taiwanese landscape for the fertile, intensely farmed west coast.

Inside there are some typical band photos of them in their gear, including the drummer's bizarre spiky mask (which looks less ridiculous close up - it has a traditional demonic face on it). The backgrounds to fit the theme - guns, and Doris the bassist apparently having just beheaded the statue of Chang Kai-shek, the former dictator of Taiwan.

Since mine is the Taiwanese issue, the sleeve notes and track listing are all in Chinese, which sadly I'm not fluent in enough to read or understand the lyrics when listening to it (although I can rarely make out lyrics even when sung cleanly in English, so I'd have no chance with Chinese black metal vocals). Luckily though, this is the age of the internet so I can read the translations online - I heard the English version of one of the tracks on the Australian radio, and it seemed pretty well done, not much different from in Chinese, but I think I prefer Freddy's singing in his native Chinese for some reason.

The concept for the album is based around the 1947 uprising by the Taiwanese against the invading army of the Chinese Kuomintang who were retreating from the mainland in the face of the Communist army. It's not really a historical album though, as it's about young Tsing-guam's quest to go down into the Taoist hells to find the Book of Life and Death and change events. Actually that would make a pretty good film… Anyway, I can't judge the Chinese lyrics, but the translations actually seemed pretty good, full of rage, vengeance and nostalgic melancholy - exactly what I want from black metal really.

Put the CD in and press play. Turn it up a bit because the start is low atmospheric noise, joined by whispering, crackling of a fire, then some sobbing. And then boom! Tremolo riffs, blast beats and grimmed vocals from the beginning with "Blooming Blades". No wasting time with overly long, pompous introductions, they take us straight into black metal bliss, and immediately throw in the erhu, the distinctive mournful Chinese violin, so you know this is something different from the start. They have a story to tell though, so you're not just being brutalised and screamed at, the riffs and tempos even in this first song are varied and don't drag on. I've mentioned before in my review of this band, but you can really hear Freddy's range as a vocalist on this album, slipping easily from grim shriek to growl, and it works really well.

 And so it is with the rest of the album, each song with its own unique  feel, none overly long or too short, they all feel pretty much as long as they should be. Production is clean and well-balanced, so it sounds warm and smooth - no fake necro-tin shed recording for these guys. The producer is Rob Caggiano of Anthrax who has produced a number of albums including some by Cradle of Filth, so this is to be expected a suppose. Despite comparisons though, I don't think this album sounds anymore like CoF than Principle of Evil Made Flesh sounds like Emperor or Burzum. One thing that I do like is that the keyboards are not dominating, all the instruments are nicely balanced

It is also nicely structured: after the intro there are five decent songs telling of the reasons and start of the quest, culminating in Sing-Ling Temple, a particularly angry song ("terror was born by the pale white sun" is a reference to the flag of the Koumintang, which now features as part of the Taiwanese flag), then a four minute calm, mournful instrumental, mostly erhu with some drums and muted storm sound effects. Take a breath. Relax. Make some tea. Are you ready?

Because next, warned only by a brief keyboard intro, you are assaulted by the melodic brutality of possibly my favourite song of the album, Fourty-Nine Theurgy Chains (whatever that means), as our hero gets deeper into the hells. I say possibly, because it's about even between that one and the next one, Rise of the Shadows. The second is less relentlessly brutal, but has a certain aggressive, militaristic groove to it, offset by the erhu, which fits the lyrics about ghost troops coming from the mirror (something like that anyway). Basically, it's awesome.

 And you won't get any rest until the end of the album because the next two tracks are not throwaways or winding down. The protagonist of the story is now descending well into hell and … well I won't spoil it, it's a pretty good story. Buy the album, read the lyrics, listen to it, several times, as it grows on you.

Gig: Chthonic Album Launch, Kaohsiung, 15th of August, 2009 Tuesday, March 23, 2010

Before I start this review I should declare that this was the first metal gig I'd been too since Marduk came to Perth at the end of 2007, so I was inevitably going to be pretty forgiving. I was suddenly seized by the urge to see some live metal, and after a surprisingly short search through sites I'd found before but not looked at too closely, I found this gig by Taiwan's biggest, most famous, and I would see best metal band, Chthonic, in the city only an hour from home the following weekend.

Taiwan is not set up for metal, especially outside of Taipei, so this gig wasn't a normal venue or pub like it might be elsewhere in the world, but a warehouse by the docks in Kaohsiung, Taiwan's second biggest city. It was in a cool arty area, but since it started while the sun was still up, it didn't feel too metal.

There was a big cavernous room, so you'd need a few thousand people to fill it. I'm not too good a judge of crowds, but I'd guess five hundred to a thousand were there. Not a lot for the biggest metal band in the country, but not bad for a place where every third song you hear as you walk down the street is Lady Gaga. Even the toilets showed you how small the metal scene is here: they were outside and there were no back stage ones, so when I went before things started I was standing between members of the band in full costume.

The crowd was also different to what you might expect. Elsewhere you'd probably find a mostly male crowd in various metal t-shirts. There were a few going for that look, and there was a bit more black than you typically find, but they were in the minority: there were also a lot of couples, and in general it would have been impossible to tell that they were going to the gig if they weren't queued up at the entrance. A more interesting feature was that lots of people brought bags of "ghost money". This comes in big yellow wads which you're meant to burn for your ancestors to use in the afterlife.

No support band, and not even a DJ or playlist while we waited - just a Marilyn Manson album, not even slightly grim and necro. All that aside, the entrance was good and atmospheric: banners hanging behind the stage, mournful erhu intro music, darkened stage, etc. When they came on they had good presence, not arrogant but with a decent amount of movement. Their current costumes a much more subdued than I'd heard, they didn't really have much "Ghost Paint" (like corpse paint but based on the guardians of Daoist hell) and had opted instead for just plain black. There was a bit of darkness around the eyes, some kind of clothe with writing on it completely covering CJ the keyboardist's face and a strange spiky mask on the drummer, but certainly not some horrible attempt to look like Immortal.

So on to the most important part: the music. It was awesome! I hadn't yet had a chance to listen to more than a couple of MP3s once or twice on their website, but I could still distinguish individual songs (unlike some bands whose songs end up blending together and sounding the same live). As a group they were very tight. Dani's drumming was damn good, Jesse played some awesome riffs and the occasional solo, but clearly knew his limits and didn't ruin things by over reaching himself. The keyboards were there, but not dominating, which in most bands that aren't Emperor is how I like them. Doris' bass was good I guess, I'm not that great a judge of bass, but I can't say her vocals were very strong - maybe it was the mix, I don't know. Freddy's vocals had a pretty good range and were convincingly grim but with their own sound. He also played their trademark erhu himself, and played it well (which is harder than it sounds - it takes a lot of training to get it to not sound like fingernails down a blackboard).

Unfortunately my Chinese is not good enough to understand speeches, as a number of times in pauses between songs he would address the crowd. I got the gist that some was about politics, some was about the recent huge typhoon (Morakot) and some was about it being nice to be back somewhere he could understand what people said after an Australian tour. It didn't seem too preachy though, having a bit of back and forth with the crowd, some jokes and laughter, it was a pretty cool atmosphere really.

The crowd was interesting to watch too - it seemed despite their unmetal attire (as mine is) they weren't there for the novelty, but genuinely liked the music. The sung along (Taiwan is a karaoke country after all), nodded along a bit, but mostly seemed fairly static in their enjoyment, apart from the enthusiastic throwing of ghost money in the air. Metal is metal though, so for a few songs at least some were unable to resist the urge to mosh, and after politely asking non-moshers to step back we had a frantic time smashing against each other on the carpet of yellow paper. I should have worn shoes though - it's hard and painful to mosh properly in sandals!

They didn't do an encore, but they did have an intermission in the middle and must have played for about two hours. I certainly wasn't disappointed, and recommend anyone to go and see them - just bring your bundles of ghost money.

Chthonic

You're in Taiwan, browsing through CDs to kill time, when you come across one that can only be metal - blood red characters, a logo that looks even more indecipherable than normal Chinese, a dark, brooding colour scheme, and violent graphics. You buy it, take it home, put it on, and suddenly your being assaulted by blast beats, tremolo guitar riffs, unmistakably black metal screams, all blended with traditional Taiwanese music through the plaintive tone of the erhu. Well done, you've just bought an album by the biggest Taiwanese metal band Chthonic.

In Taiwan, many people have a "Chinese name" written in Chinese characters, and an "English name" which is supposedly easier for non-Chinese speakers to pronounce. Taiwan's most famous metal band have taken a different approach though. Their Chinese name is 閃靈 , pronounced "shan ling" - fairly easy for most people to pronounce I think - but not so their English name, which is hard to say without showering your listener with saliva: Chthonic. Apparently this is an actual word, coming from Greek and is some kind of adjective to do with dieties, so it might appropriate.

Despite their name and the tiny size of the scene they spring from, Chthonic are a damn good black metal band. I've read a quite few reviews that compare them to Cradle of Filth, but this seems unfair. As far as I can tell, these comparisons seem to be based on them a) being a metal band and b) using keyboards. I actually quite like Cradle of Filth, but even they don't define themselves as black metal, and Chthonic to me at least fall very firmly at the black end of the metal spectrum. There is no gothic feel to the music, or vampire erotica in the artwork, image or lyrics, all of which are more serious (without disappearing up their own arses). In fact, there is one well known BM band that uses keyboards whose influence I can hear - Emperor.

In interviews it's become clear that their main metal influences are indeed in Scandinavia rather than Birmingham, but unlike many bands around the world they've looked deeper into the general feel, lyrics and philosophy of the original BM circle. Despite an alarming number of missionaries here, Taiwan's culture has not been oppressed or even just apparently oppressed by Christianity, so Chthonic have realised that singing about Satan or Norse gods would be completely irrelevant here. Taiwanese aboriginal culture has to an extent been repressed, but it has also been absorbed into the Confucian-Taoist-Buddhist combination that is the religion of most people both in mainland China and Taiwan.

So Chthonic draw from their native religion, writing songs about the gods, hells, demons and legends of Taiwan. I'm not sure how good the original lyrics sound in Chinese when not being screamed, but translated they read no more ridiculous than other black metal, much less ridiculous than most, and actually keep to a theme quite well.

Their image has also been influenced this way. They don't just wear the old corpse paint, but "ghostpaint" originally based their look on various demons of the 8 generals of Taoist hell, though they seem to have morphed away from this to include a guy with no face and a goth girl Doris the bassist who has been rather popular at photo shoots on their recent world tour. At gigs, you bring "ghost money" (paper money normally burnt to honour ancestors) and through it on stage or up in the air at key moments in the songs.

And then there is the music itself, which as well as great heavy riffs, also has traditional instruments and music layered over the top or in fills between tracks, most prominently the erhu, a two stringed instrument played with a bow. I've heard some reviews of early albums I have yet to hear that questioned how well this was done, but to my ears on the latest, "Mirror of Retribution", it works very well, though it would be good to hear even more, and instruments other than the erhu. I'd particularly like to hear the crazy cacophany of drums and symbols that accompany many celebrations here, from festivals to funerals, somehow used in metal, as I think it could sound awesome.

In looking from something kind of oppression to rebel against, Chthonic have also, like some European BM bands, found a political cause, although thankful not quite as moronic, obnoxious, vile and reactionary as the white supremacists in some of my favourite bands. The lead singer Freddy in particular has been very outspoken in favour of Taiwanese independence from mainland China at gigs, in interviews, in press releases, and even lecture tours.

If you don't know about the China/Taiwan issue, this may be a little hard to understand, but here's a brief summary of the history: mainland China was declared a republic in 1911,and then decended into civil war which continued into and beyond the Second World War. Taiwan meanwhile was under (comparatively benign) Japanese occupation from 1897 until the end of the Second World War when it was handed over to China. On the mainland, the civil war was now between the Communists and the Nationalists of the KMT, but the latter were losing badly and had to retreat to Taiwan, clashing with those who already lived there.

Now, the mainland still claims Taiwan as a rebelious part of the People's Republic of China, while Taiwan is officially the free are of the Republic of China, but there is a growing tendency calling for it to declare its independence. If it ever does, China will probably invade, and despite not recognising the ROC, the US is bound to defend it. So that's what it's all about. Personally I don't agree with either side, but it is nice to have a black metal band that isn't just going "oh satan" or "kill the Jews".

Politics aside, maybe due to the tiny size of the metal scene here even with growing international success they do seem approachable and not arrogant towards their fans. Their website is nicely laid out, frequently updated and features a biography, a shop, some wallpapers, tour details and links, but unfortunately no lyrics, so if like me you have Taiwanese releases but don't speak Chinese you have to look elsewhere for translations. They also have a Facebook page as is the fashion now, though it is pretty handy for gig updates etc. Finally, their Encyclopaedia Metallum entry is pretty good, and has their cool old, more necro logo, rather than the new legible one.