No kind of rock 'n' roll music, it seems, has more subgenres than heavy metal. Christians can listen to Christian metal. Rap fans get a dose of hip-hop with rapcore and nu metal. Northern Europeans into pagan Germanic mythology bang their heads to a crossover of subgenres called Viking metal. There's neoclassical metal, atmospheric sludge, doomdeath … even folk metal. Just to name a few.
All this is confusing for outsiders, but it's a marketing technique that appeals to the initiated since metal heads tend to be more devoted than the average pop music consumer to a particular sound.
So what do you do if you're a heavy metal band and none of the myriad preexisting subgenres apply? If you're DragonForce, an up-and-coming group from the UK who visit Taipei next week, you invent your own.
PHOTO: ROCK EMPIRE
"Everyone was calling us power metal when we came out," said Herman Li, part of DragonForce's twin guitar duo. "People were confused, because they liked us but they really didn't like the old power-metal style."
So DragonForce came up with the term "extreme power metal" to describe their music, which sounds like it incorporates elements of everything from death and speed metal to progressive metal and thrash. What DragonForce doesn't really sound like is old, 1980s-style power metal. (Li said they like faster power metal but find the mid-tempo songs boring.) DragonForce music is melodic, but it's played with the energy of speed metal. And then there's the fact that DragonForce's third and most recent album, Inhuman Rampage, kind of sounds like music from a video game. That's not like power metal at all.
"Before every album we spend a session making weird noises on the guitar," said Li, who was interviewed by phone from London. "The last time, we were making a lot of noise and we thought, 'Wow, it sounds just like [video games]. That's cool.'"
It might sound strange, but the video game sound is kind of catchy, especially if you like unbelievably fast twin-guitar harmonies, extremely powerful drumming, a heavy does of keyboard and lyrics of the epic/fantasy variety. DragonForce has been nominated for Best Live Band at this year's Metal Hammer Golden Globe Awards, and guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman are up for Best Shredder. Also this year, Rhythm magazine named drummer Dave Mackintrosh fifth-best metal drummer. Keyboardist Vadim Pruzhanov has been known to play with his tongue.
The Force have played with Iron Maiden in Europe and broke into the difficult US market with an MTV video and as the opening act for last year's Ozzfest. They're returning to Asia and Australia for the Inhuman Rampage World Tour 2007, before playing festivals in continental Europe and the UK later this spring. Opening for them in Taipei is local shredder Marty Young and his band.
DragonForce will play the Armed Forces Art Center (國軍文藝中心) at 16 Zhonghua Rd Sec 1, Taipei (台北市中華路一段16號) at 7pm on Tuesday, May 22. NT$1,000 to NT$2,200 tickets are available through ERA ticketing at www.ticket.com.tw. Tickets and DragonForce CDs are available through the Rock Empire Web site at www.rockempire.com.tw
Last week Joseph Nye, the well-known China scholar, wrote on the Australian Strategic Policy Institute’s website about how war over Taiwan might be averted. He noted that years ago he was on a team that met with then-president Chen Shui-bian (陳水扁), “whose previous ‘unofficial’ visit to the US had caused a crisis in which China fired missiles into the sea and the US deployed carriers off the coast of Taiwan.” Yes, that’s right, mighty Chen caused that crisis all by himself. Neither the US nor the People’s Republic of China (PRC) exercised any agency. Nye then nostalgically invoked the comical specter
Relations between Taiwan and the Czech Republic have flourished in recent years. However, not everyone is pleased about the growing friendship between the two countries. Last month, an incident involving a Chinese diplomat tailing the car of vice president-elect Hsiao Bi-khim (蕭美琴) in Prague, drew public attention to the People’s Republic of China’s (PRC) operations to undermine Taiwan overseas. The trip was not Hsiao’s first visit to the Central European country. It was meant to be low-key, a chance to meet with local academics and politicians, until her police escort noticed a car was tailing her through the Czech capital. The
April 15 to April 21 Yang Kui (楊逵) was horrified as he drove past trucks, oxcarts and trolleys loaded with coffins on his way to Tuntzechiao (屯子腳), which he heard had been completely destroyed. The friend he came to check on was safe, but most residents were suffering in the town hit the hardest by the 7.1-magnitude Hsinchu-Taichung Earthquake on April 21, 1935. It remains the deadliest in Taiwan’s recorded history, claiming around 3,300 lives and injuring nearly 12,000. The disaster completely flattened roughly 18,000 houses and damaged countless more. The social activist and
Over the course of former President Ma Ying-jeou’s (馬英九) 11-day trip to China that included a meeting with Chinese Communist Party (CCP) leader Xi Jinping (習近平) a surprising number of people commented that the former president was now “irrelevant.” Upon reflection, it became apparent that these comments were coming from pro-Taiwan, pan-green supporters and they were expressing what they hoped was the case, rather than the reality. Ma’s ideology is so pro-China (read: deep blue) and controversial that many in his own Chinese Nationalist Party (KMT) hope he retires quickly, or at least refrains from speaking on some subjects. Regardless