You hear a bit of the kinda instruments you would hear in the soundtrack of a kung-fu movie (mentioned is the erhu, or two-string Chinese violin) but it mostly sounds like they take a lot from the Swedish metal scene (like everyone else in the world). It’s enjoyable, atmospheric metal with black tinge and obvious classical (not classical metal, classical classical) influence, despite the fact that some of the female vocals are overdone. (Yeh, I normally don’t promote bands with female vocals anyway due to religious reasons, but I said I would do this review before I knew there was female vocals on it so there’s a loophole for that). The male vocals are a nice range of growling and highpitched screeches. There is nice interplay though.

Interestingly enough, Wikipedia notes that “Lead vocalist Freddy Lin is notably active in the political scene, supports negationism and the current DPP government in Taiwan. This helped the band to be the spokesperson of the products of the government owned company Taiyen Biotech Co.. Freddy Lin claimed to have psychological problems to avoid military service.” They’re against Chinese imperialism and the decimation of the separate Taiwanese culture, which is what a lot of the Scandinavian metal is about – getting back to pagan roots and this and that (feh, they lose me with that idol worship bullcrap). I appreciate the fact that they want to fight for their country and go against the UN – good luck with that, guys.

Lin would make for an interesting interview, to be sure. I wonder how Lin feels about American ‘imperialism,’ or how the regular, usually blue-collar Ozzfest crowd will take ChthoniC. I mean, hell, my whole professional industry is picking up and moving to China/Taiwan cause labor is so much cheaper there. Not that I personally hold anything against the Chinese (hey, take what you can get), but some of these Ozzfest people could be pretty racist about it. It’s really rare someone of the regular Chinese culture jumps into the metal world, let alone a subsect of it that didn’t want to be part of it in the first place. But the music should speak for itself. Good stuff.

Hmf.