Ὁπλίτης - Ψευδομένη (2023)

Country: China
Style: Progressive Black Metal
Rating: 8/10
Release Date: 1 Jan 2023
Sites: Bandcamp | YouTube

It's about time I reviewed something that isn't just not in English, it's not even in the Latin script. However, even though Ὁπλίτης is a Chinese project, it's actually in the Greek alphabet because Liu Zhenyang, the imagination behind this one man band, is a fan of Greek mythology and that seems to be what this is about, not that lyrics are remotely discernible (and not all these are vocal songs anyway). Then again, his previous release was an album, credited to a concurrent project, Vitriolic Sage, called Feuerschlucker, which is German for Fire Eater. Maybe he's a multilinguist.

He certainly seems to like playing with language, because four songs here boast very close names to four other songs, transforming their meaning in a different direction. Ψευδόμαντις seems to be a transliteration of Pseudomantis, while the almost identically titled Ψευδομάρτυς, right after it, means False Witness. The same goes for the other pairs, each of which sit next to each other on the album, except for the bookends. Suddenly I don't trust Google Translate to handle the nuances I assume are needed for a proper translation.

Few of these songs feature vocals in a traditional sense, meaning that some deliver lyrics like we might expect but some are just vocalisations for effect. It also means that when lyrics do show up, they're delivered in thoroughly different ways. For instance, they're notably traditional on False Witness, a low-pitched and bleak barrage of words to match the low-pitched and bleak barrage of the music behind them. However, they're so buried on Ὁ τῶν δακρύων ψεῦδος (The Tears are a Lie, as against Ὁ τῶν δακρύων ἄγγελος, The Angel of Tears) that they're almost a whisper. The ending shifts into what I presume is a sampled voice.

Either way, what that means is that the music dominates the vocals, and it seems notably keen on dominating everything. It's surprisingly clear given that it seems to be maxing out the wavelength across the board. Every aspect is in your face, whether fast or, well, less fast. I've reviewed albums lately that feel like they need to be turned up, even if your volume knob won't go any further. This one counters that trend, because it feels like we need to turn it down to be able to comprehend it, even if it's not actually that loud. That's because the mixer apparently moved every slider all the way up to eleven and we can't be sure we're actually hearing it all. The peaks are really high.

And that goes for other aspects here. I felt that The Tears are a Lie was a sonic bludgeoning, with vicious intent. This track is akin to being repeatedly beaten around the head in an artistic fashion. My ears may be bleeding but the blood is pooling into the shape of the headdress on the lady in the cover art. However, the next song, The Angel of Tears, enhances that still further, with a fierce escalation in intensity that's almost too much to bear. By the way, the album's Bandcamp page is of the opinion that the cover depicts Ὄλλυμι, which is ancient Greek for "to destroy" or "to lose", but she's really an unidentified sorceress in a painting by Georges Merle called L’Envoûteuse.

And then we get to Μάρτυς (March, as against Μάντις, meaning Mantis). This entire album is fast and I mean really fast. However fast you're imagining, it's faster. But March is faster still. This is a song that may be faster than anything I've ever heard, so fast that I don't think my brain took it all in. It would be fascinating to see if Liu ever plays live under the Ὁπλίτης banner. My guess is that this took some programming to edge over whatever the previous limit was and the album title has an important meaning, Ψευδομένη translating to Fake. That doesn't mean this isn't real music, only that I can't imagine Liu playing it all himself.

As music, it seems like a milestone, a point at which Liu made black metal scary again. The genre's moved a long way in its time, often in directions that nobody expected. Never mind Zeal & Ardor's deliberately bizarre merging with bluegrass, who would have imagined, listening to Bathory back in 1984 that one day the genre he was creating would embrace ambient and dark jazz and add sax to the instrument list? I think it's more likely that they just thought that bands would take it and make it more and more intense. This is a logical step beyond wherever it had got previously.

And I rather enjoyed it. It's clearly black metal above everything else, but there are firm hints of industrial in the bludgeoning beats and nods towards crushing intensity in genres outside metal, bands like Swans and Einstürzende Neubauten, even some Merzbow on Μάρτυς. Yet it wraps up in almost acoustic Jandek territory on Δηλητήρ, which featured some truly frantic basswork earlier on. This isn't just a bludgeoning, it's also the sorceress kissing our wounds better once we recover our senses.

It's very possible that this will be one of the most divisive albums of the year. I can see people not ready for this sort of assault giving it 0/10 and telling their friends that it's the worst album they have ever heard. I can also see die hard black metal fans gleefully going with a 10/10, then telling their friends that it's the most intense experience they've ever had. While acknowledging both as valid opinions, I think I'm going with an 8/10 because this is next level stuff for me. I'm reeling but I'm going to listen to it again tomorrow and see if it stands up. It's too much to repeat again now.

Nine Treasures - Awakening from Dukkha (2021)

Country: Mongolia
Style: Folk Metal
Rating: 7/10
Release Date: 19 Mar 2021
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Instagram | Official Website | Twitter | Wikipedia | YouTube

I don't usually review compilation albums at Apocalypse Later, because there's far too much good new music to talk about instead. I'll make an exception here, though, for three primary reasons.

One is that I'd be shocked if many of you have heard the first three albums by Nine Treasures, who are a Mongolian folk metal band currently based in Beijing, China. They were formed in 2010, as were the far more prolific and sadly now disbanded Tengger Cavalry. That's six years before the Hu, who were a lot of people's introduction to Mongolian folk metal, but six years after Hanggai, a folk punk band of renown, who built on the folk music traditions of bands like Huun-Huur Tu and Altan Urag. And yes, if you're interested in Mongolian folk music, all these bands are well worth checking out.

Another is that, if you decided to seek those three albums out now, you wouldn't be able to find them, as the band weren't happy with the recording quality and pulled them from Bandcamp. All you'll find is this compilation, which features twelve songs taken from those earlier three albums but recorded afresh by the current line-up of the band in consistent style and with consistent production.

And that means that, for three, to the mind of the band members, this is a new album as much as it's a compilation, one that certainly looks to the past but also celebrates a rebirth, one that reflects the band as it is today and one that they can use as the bedrock from which to move forward. So, if this is new music both to Nine Treasures and to you, it fits here. My mission at Apocalypse Later is discovery and covering this album would seem to meet that.

If your exposure to Mongolian folk metal is, like most people in the west, limited to the Hu, you'll find that Nine Treasures are faster, heavier and more metallic, but just as inherently rooted in folk music. Just check out the opener to this album, Black Heart, which has guitars as crunchy as in the Hu's cover of Sad But True, but feels more like a speed metal playing a jig. The song doesn't stay that fast, but it isn't an unusual speed for them and they stay this heavy throughout, meaning that they often sound as similar to a band like Korpiklaani as one like the Hu.

Like most Mongolian metal, this features delicate finger picking strings and a bowed instrument that sounds kind of like a violin playing over the crunchy metal riffs that underpin everything. The latter is a morin khuur, a massively important instrument in Mongolia that we would call a horse head fiddle. I doubt you'll find much Mongolian music that doesn't feature at least one of these in their group. The former, however, isn't the tovshuur, or western Mongolian lute, that the Hu use, but a balalaika, which adds a neat touch to their sound.

And, over the top, of course, are the rough vocals that most Mongolian metal bands have. There's not as much in the way of throat singing here as other bands but four out of the five members sing as well as play their chosen instruments and they all sing in Mongolian. Their voices are clear and clean but in varying degrees of harsh texture and often deep. There are hints of drone and lots of rolling Rs, so it's very recognisably Mongolian singing. If you were enthused by the vocals on the Hu's Wolf Totem, you will be very much at home here.

What surprised me is that my favourite songs come from all three of the band's source albums for this compilation. Only two songs here come from their 2012 debut, Arvan Ald Guulin Honshoor, but I adore that album's title track, which is very much like a Mongolian Korpiklaani. Six are sourced from 2013's Nine Treasures, including the bookends: the frantic Black Heart and the more bouncy Three Years Old Warrior. I particularly like The Dream About Ancient City, which is a classy instrumental. That leaves a quartet from their 2017 album Wisdom Eyes, which all have opportunities for the balalaika, including its gloriously subtle title track and The End of the World, which features an excellent intro.

I can't remember how I got introduced to Mongolian metal. It certainly wasn't the Hu, because it was much earlier. I was a fan of Huun-Huur Tu and some YouTube algorithm showed me something heavier, probably either Tengger Cavalry or Nine Treasures. Like most people, I haven't looked back since, and this is a great way to be introduced to Nine Treasures. I hope it serves as the rebirth they so richly deserve and that they're soon on as many people's radars as the Hu and for many of the same reasons. Hey, they covered Metallica in 2012, with their debut album including their take on For Whom the Bell Tolls. The world's just catching up to them.

Vengeful Spectre - Vengeful Spectre (2020)

Country: China
Style: Black/Folk Metal
Rating: 9/10
Release Date: 15 Jan 2020
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives | Weibo

I wasn't expecting it but here's something special. Vengeful Spectre play an impressive combination of black and folk metal that works on both fronts. I just wish that I could praise the individual band members but there isn't a lot of core information on Vengeful Spectre's Bandcamp or Facebook pages and I won't trust Google Translate to attempt a page on the Chinese social media network Weibo.

This truly blisters as black metal, with strong riffs, decent solos, frantic blastbeats and a glorious lead vocal shriek that ably plays into the torment and pain of the album's war-based concept. I have no idea what the story is, but it unfolds over the six tracks on offer. It's much more black than it is folk, but there are Chinese folk instruments in play too, sometimes during the actual songs and frequently between them. In fact, the whole album opens peacefully but darkly as plaintive flutes waft over a landscape that surely resembles the cover art. The job's done but it took a serious toll.

The first song, The Expendables, is thoroughly enjoyable with what I believe is a pipa punctuating certain parts. I adore pipa and remember how much fun it was to get hold of a Wu Man album I'd been introduced to on the BBC World Service before the internet made it easy. However, as solid as this song is, Desperate War ups the game considerably. This is a real peach of a piece of music, everything that was good about the opener doubled in power, intensity and impact. This could be the single best black metal track I've heard in years.

Wailing Wrath starts and ends with a wind instrument that I can't place, but it sounds delightfully like a versatile conch shell and it gets a lead role in the brief interlude called Hermit. Wailing Wrath settles down a lot more than its predecessor, content for the most part to find a strong groove for ethnic instruments to dance around, but there are impressive bits here too.

And, at this point, I realised that I was well over twenty minutes in even though I felt like the album had only just begun. I was so immersed that I'd lost track of time completely. The only reason that I noticed at this point is because Hermit (and the subsequent long intro to Rainy Night Carnage) is a brief eye to the raging storm that is this album, allowing us a moment to gather ourselves before moving back into the fray.

If nothing here is up to the sheer majesty of Desperate War, then Rainy Day Carnage does at least come very close. While it's also more black than folk, it's the song where the folk instruments come out to play more and it's much more balanced as a black/folk song. There's more pipa and some flute and I'd love to know what else. That level adds strong atmosphere to this and other songs just as much as the constant rain and other sounds of battle that are often audible.

That leaves Despair and Resentment, which wraps up this story "of eastern swordsmen concerning war, conspiracy, betrayal and revenge". It opens calmly as if we're in the aftermath of everything but then everything kicks in, at a slower but just as heavy pace. There's acknowledgement of inevitability in this song, dealing with what everyone knew would come even as they hoped it wouldn't. That lead voice feels even more pained and that's exquisite.

I grabbed the opportunity to listen to this album more from the folk aspect than the black, so I ought to be disappointed that it's more focused on the latter than the former. I'm not. I adored this, because it blisters the way that black metal so often fails to do and the folk instrumentation is added into the mix effectively. I believe this is a debut album, which makes it an even more stunning achievement.

It's not perfect, even without knowing the story that's being told. There's a jagged transition from calm intro to full steam ahead on The Expendables that's only underlined by how smoothly the intros transition on later tracks like Rainy Night Carnage. I didn't feel the album ended with enough emphasis either, though again understanding the story might help a little. Those are far from big problems though and they hardly lessen the impact of a special album. This is fantastic stuff. Can we have the sequel next week?

Dressed to Kill - Midnight Impulsion (2019)

Country: China
Style: Heavy/Speed Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 23 Nov 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Douban | Facebook | Metal Archives | YouTube

I'm not sure that Dressed to Kill, who hail from Beijing, China, have quite figured out what they want to be yet, but that's fine because they're pretty good at a number of different things. Even once we get past the intro, which is a soft synth thing that sounds like it could have escaped from a B-movie soundtrack from the eighties, maybe the same one that's depicted in the art on the cover, the songs never manage to seem entirely consistent.

They start out with Midnight Comes Around, buzzsaw guitars and fast drumming heralding a speed metal song. The band are Chinese but they sing in English and this song is reminiscent of a bunch of speed metal bands from the early eighties, whether Canadian, American or even British, one of the NWOBHM era bands who felt the urge to speed up, especially given that there's a lot of twin guitar attack in the midsection. This band could easily have shared the stage with Raven and Tokyo Blade and done it well.

Then they move into Rose of Kowloon, which drops the speed and moves into a more traditional NWOBHM sound. It's a catchier track with neat hooks, though it never feels as mainstream or commercial as say, the Scorpions. It's still the music of a jobbing metal band who do their business on the stage. So are Dressed to Kill a heavy metal band or a speed metal band?

Let's check out Welcome to My Carnival, which kicks off with a neat intro of carnival organ and wicked laughter. It moves, however, into punk territory, albeit the glam end of punk, so more like the New York Dolls or Hanoi Rocks than the Ramones or the Sex Pistols. So that's three styles so far in three songs, albeit with Yang Ce's vocals moving seamlessly between them. I wonder where Dressed to Kill will take us next!

Well, things move back and forth between those styles as the album runs on. Breakin Thru the Sky feels urgent: up tempo heavy metal but not speed until a faster section late on, all bolsted with a punk anger. Rock on the Way of Dream plays with that glam sound, with sleazier guitar solos, shouted yeahs and a hairspray laden intro. A Blade in the Night is back to straight speed metal, making me wonder how much this band would blister on stage. I'd love to see them live to find that out on songs like this one.

Part of the problem is the production, which leaves them sounding more like a glam metal band than I think they would otherwise. The vocals are high in the mix, as are the cymbals, but the back end is restrained. With that back end bulked up, as I tried to emulate with my equalizer, Dressed to Kill are a heck of a lot more powerful than they might initially seem.

As much as I like Yang Ce's voice, it's the instrumental sections that sold me on the band most, especially with that equalizer tweaked so I could hear the excellent contributions of Hao Chenxi on bass and Zhang Yichi's drumkit doesn't sound like it's in the next studio over, being recorded through two open doors. The guitarists are Yang Fuwen and Chen Wake and they duel very nicely indeed in the Iron Maiden tradition. The intro to Queen of the Night is glorious and there are sections in almost every song that made me grin.

This is Dressed to Kill's debut album, even though they formed back in 2013. They released an EP in 2017, which featured two songs that made it onto this album too, Murder City and Speed Metal Mania, along with a cover of A-II-Z's The Witch of Berkeley, to underline that NWOBHM influence. However, they've changed vocalist and one guitarist since then, so I'd expect it to sound a little different to this.

I'm interested enough to find out, though, because Dressed to Kill are solid enough to make me pay attention. This isn't the greatest album ever recorded and I hate that production more and more with each listen, but it shows much promise for a band who are happy to alternate between 1983 and 1986 and who really don't seem to care about anything released since. I'd like to hear a fresh album in a couple of years time to see how they've grown.

Mefitis - Despair (2019)

Country: China
Style: Progressive Black Metal
Rating: 6/10
Release Date: 19 Jul 2019
Sites: Bandcamp | Facebook | Metal Archives

I have to admit that this EP leapt out for a number of reasons. For one, it features progressive black metal from Beijing, China, which had to be heard. For another, the demonic growling vibrato is provided by the same young lady who did the cover art, Rexco by name. And for three, Rexco aside, the band don't remotely look Chinese. Drummer Darian Kocmur also plays in Teleport, who are certainly appropriately named given that they're based in Slovenia, making his commute pretty tedious otherwise. And that leaves Allen Darling, surely the least Chinese name I can imagine, even with the prefix of Lucky, as it often has. He used to be the entire band.

This is Mefitis's debut EP, but Darling released a demo under that name back in 2017, called Nascence, and handled everything on it himself: the vocals, the guitars, the bass and the drum programming, quite probably the delivery of lunch during recording for good measure. I took a quick listen to that in preparation for this and quickly realised that the addition of other band members helped a great deal. Mefitis are deeper and more interesting when he doesn't have to do everything himself.

And they are both deep and interesting. This is a short EP, blistering along for the most part for twenty minutes, at which point it's done, but it does much of note along the way. Never mind the point a minute into opener Cetus when they shift between a few tempos seamlessly, what's going on behind the repeat of that thirty seconds later? There's a twanging that's only just in hearing, but is impossible to ignore, that sounds like Jew's harp. It comes back later, as do tempo changes, the instrumental section as far in again a real highlight and a very complex one too.

The beginning of Ecdysis, which means the shedding of an outer cuticle layer by animals who go in for that sort of thing, is gloriously intricate too. I was thrown back to bands like Mekong Delta who brought avant garde jazz into an extreme metal mindset back in the late eighties.

Desecrate is even more interesting. It starts out minimally, with Rexco like a demon creature recently escaped from a cage and ready to devour anyone or anything she encounters in the next five minutes. She has a wild and evilly dangerous voice and, while I have no idea what language she's singing, let alone what words, it's often easy to get caught up in what she's doing and forget there's music being played behind her. That music is far slower here, even when it gallops, and there are so many cymbals in play that surely some of them have to be bells.

That leaves Lotophagi, or Lotus Eaters, presumably meaning the tribe of lost addicts that Odysseus encountered when returning home from Troy, given that Cetus was a sea monster in Greek mythology. Of course, Mefitis was Roman not Greek, or rather pre-Roman as she was the goddess of poisonous vapours (foul-smelling gases of the earth) to the Samnites, who dominated central Italy in the years before the rise of Rome.

This one layers voices, demonic and clean, surely male and female too, and gets all melodic behind them. At the two and a half minute mark, everything goes quiet, a rumbling bass and a delicate guitar providing the eye in the storm that inevitably returns with a vengeance.

How this trio stay so tight when there are so many time changes, I have no idea. I presume it's a heck of a lot of practice. Having Darling on guitars and bass means that they can't have played live in the studio, of course. I wonder how many takes they took to knock out Lotophagi. The layering of the multiple voices helped it too, because, while I enjoyed Rexco's voice, it's really difficult to vary a delivery like that and that approach was getting old, even by that point.

I got a real kick out of this, but twenty minutes is probably a good length, as I'm not sure how I'd react to twenty more of similar material. I have a good deal of praise for the variety they snuck into the first twenty but I don't believe that a further twenty would help coherence. As it stands, I'm liking the ways they're finding to subvert their black metal, but I'm ready for it to get old as soon as that supply of subversion runs out.

I'd like to hear a full length album now just to see if they can keep this style interesting for forty minutes plus.