People talk a lot about luck in the music business. They throw around cliches like “right place, right time” and “they just had the sound everyone was looking for at the moment.” Most often, people who do so either have never been in a band, or are in lazy — or just plain terrible — bands waiting for that mythical benevolent deal to wrap them up in a boa constrictor embrace and tell them everything’s gonna be all right.
What these types don’t realize is that there is no such thing as luck. Success is a result of beating your forehead bloody against the same brick wall 99 times and going back for what will either be the blow that kills, or the one that knocks the wall down.
Perugia, Italy’s Fleshgod Apocalypse is one of those bands that never had much use for luck. Ever since they formed in 2007, they’ve been too busy shaping their own destiny to pay attention to any mystical forces of fortune. From the very beginning, the band has aspired to the realization of a sound that marries the nocturnal and ethereal qualities of Romantic-era classical music with the technicality, speed and aggression of death metal. Think of Mozart meets Swedish death metal and classic, late 80s to early 90s Floridian death metal, only with a more technical tinge nodding toward the Berklee crowd.
Photo courtesy of Hard Impact Music
To most, the sheer grandiosity, bordering ever so closely on pomposity, would be enough to send them scurrying back to the comforting shadow of convention. For Fleshgod Apocalypse, there has never been a single step back.
Then there are the lyrics. Being from Italy, the Sicilian mafia, or the Cosa Nostra, is a subject not just of interest for the band, but one that has a direct impact on the very heartbeat of their homeland. So, perhaps it is unsurprising that the band’s second release, the Mafia EP, took the subject on so directly. The songs rail against the endemic violence, corruption and greed of the organized crime syndicate — a bold move in a country where the institution’s veil of silence was, not so long ago, a tenet observed as faithfully as a papal bull if you valued your life.
Moves such as this have become the band’s trademark, though. This is what has taken Fleshgod Apocalypse on such a swiftly rising trajectory, winning them coveted opening slots on pan-European tours almost from the beginning. Just a hint at the band’s inception, the orchestral and operatic elements of their music have grown in size and scope with each new release, which has drawn some criticism. Some say the band is in danger of imploding on its own sense of grandeur. But why should they listen? Just like the Cosa Nostra, this is “Our Thing,” that is to say their thing, and they don’t need outsiders telling them what to do, or how to do it.
■ Fleshgod Apocalypse headlines Day of Reckoning VIII tomorrow night at The Wall, B1, 200, Roosevelt Rd Sec 4, Taipei City (台北市羅斯福路四段200號B1). Tickets are NT$1,200 in advance, NT$1,500 at the door. Doors open at 7:30pm and the show begins at 8pm.
Death metal a tad too harsh for your delicate sensibilities? Well, if there was ever a band to serve as a bridge between the saccharine world of pop and the harsh brutality of metal, it would have to be Japan’s MOZ8. Since 2006, the band has brought together the disparate sounds of death-growl verses and syrupy-sweet choruses that wouldn’t sound out of place in an X Japan anthem. This goes far beyond the growl-whine-growl of metalcore — not just winking at pop rock, but diving into it headlong. When MOZ8 talks about its very own “Metal Pop Movement,” they mean it in the most literal sense possible.
So, the most obvious question would have to be, is it just a novelty, or something more? Well, novelties don’t tend to have a shelf life nearing the decade mark, unless you count the backward baseball cap bro-down nostalgia-geddon that is the nu-metal resurgence. Since 2010 the band has popped out (pun intended, God help me) one full-length album and a pair of EPs, all remaining faithful to the same formula — the melding of visual kei heavy metal, death metal vocal styles, and unabashed pop. It’s somewhat similar to Babymetal, only heavier, and without the grating, high-pitch preteen bird chirps and that bizarre Lolita fetish bordering on the oh-so-very-wrong. Let’s just call it Babymetal without the guilt trip, then.
■ MOZ8 plays tonight at Revolver, 1-2 Roosevelt Rd Sec 1, Taipei City (台北市中正區羅斯福路一段1-2號). Tickets are NT$300 at the door with one drink. Doors open at 9pm and the show gets underway at 9:30pm.
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