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Through the fire and flames

DragonForce had to come up with its own sub-genre to describe its sound. PHOTO: ROCK EMPIRE

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.

"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

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