Tomorrow sees melodic death metal group The Haunted from Sweden playing with local act Infernal Chaos in a metal extravaganza that should leave partygoers with stiff necks and throbbing eardrums.
The music continues with a second show, billed as an “afterparty,” that begins at 10:30pm, with industrial music by Roughhausen, heavy metal/grunge rockers Doublewide, and Into the Void, a Black Sabbath tribute band.
The Haunted started off in 1996, and the release of the group’s first album in 1998 garnered Terrorizer magazine’s Album of the Year award. Peter Dolving’s lead vocals are scathing, introspective and full of angst. The song D.O.A. from The Haunted’s 2004 album One Kill Wonder was made available for download in March this year for a video game called Rock Band on Xbox and PlayStation.
Taipei’s Infernal Chaos was formed by guitarist Jesse Liu (小黑) of Chthonic (閃靈) and plays a driving, engaging style of thrash metal.
The afterparty features Taiwan resident singer, songwriter, producer, keyboardist and guitarist Jeff Stoddard’s industrial band Roughhausen.
Although Roughhausen tours Europe, the US and Southeast Asia regularly, it has only recently started doing shows here.
While Stoddard calls Germany “the center of the universe for this kind of music,” he adds that has been “getting a lot of love and warmth [recently] from the local death metal crowd.”
“As an artist, I keep the integrity to myself,” he says. “As a performer I have to keep the audience, so I focus more on the industrial hardcore: guitars, verse/chorus structure. It’s sharp [and] blindly angry but it’s something familiar.”
Stoddard, who hails from Canada but hasn’t been back since he left six years ago, grew up in hippie communes in the US and found himself attracted to Vancouver’s industrial scene, where he spent more than two years in Skinny Puppy’s studio beginning in 1996.
“I was 20 years old serving at the table of the masters,” he says.
The use of samples from cult leaders such as Charles Manson, David Koresh and Jim Jones in Stoddard’s music reflects his fascination with “the raw power of these personalities to convince people of things they know logically and rationally to be untrue.”
Doublewide, featuring vocalist Macgregor Wooley, also New Hong Kong Hair City’s saxophone player, ends the night’s proceedings. The group is “a hodgepodge of heavy sounds,” Wooley says.
At the Lost Lagoon party on Oct. 12, Doublewide, with Wooley painted half black and half white and making crazy eyes at the crowd, stole the show.
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