Review Summary: They say that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. If that is true, then this album is surely going to make Dani Filth blush.
Oh, I still remember as if it had happened two years ago. I remember me, then a poor malnourished student, sitting in my room with my laptop checking out Ozzfest 2007’s lineup instead of studying for my Genetics exam. It was then when I came across a picture of a bunch of Asians (among them a cute female, I must add) in corpse paint, with an undecipherable logo on top that seemed to scream “we are a black metal band.” I clicked on the photo, which ended up redirecting me to that band’s MySpace page. It was there when I heard “Quasi Putrefaction” and fell in love with it. So once weekend arrived I ran off to the record store to pick up Chthonic’s
Seediq Bale. While the album didn’t blow me away, I found it to be a very enjoyable symphonic black metal album and I thought to myself: “These guys are up to something. I bet their next album is going to be great.”
Now their next album is here, all I can say is that I’m disappointed.
While the
Cradle Of Filth/
Dimmu Borgir roots on
Seediq Bale were more than obvious, the album had an interesting oriental folk sound going on that made it sound refreshing without straying too far from what we all know as symphonic black metal.
Mirror Of Retribution, on the other hand, feels like a by-the-numbers black metal album made by a band too scared to explore more of the uncharted territory they had set foot on with their previous album. Yes, the oriental sounds and the band’s trademark
erhu (a two-stringed Chinese violin) are still present, but they don’t flow as well with the rest of the instruments as they did on
Seediq Bale; rather, it feels like they were forcibly added to the band’s newly adopted generic black metal style. In the end, Chthonic had never sounded more like a Cradle Of Filth ripoff as they do on this album.
Produced by
Anthrax guitarist Rob Caggiano (who, by the way, produced Cradle Of Filth’s
Nymphetamine and
Thornography),
Mirror Of Retribution contains, save from the two minutes of
Silent Hill-esque noises that comprise “Autoscopy,” everything you’d expect from an album from Dani Filth’s band: tremolo-picked riffs, gothic keyboards, blast beats, shrieked vocals, female choirs, you name it. The album's first proper song, “Blooming Blades,” is Chthonic’s own “Shat Out Of Hell” (from Cradle’s
Goodspeed On The Devil’s Thunder), but at least the ehru is better incorporated than on most of the album. "Forty-Nine Theurgy Chains" is a copy of “The Twisted Nails Of Faith” (from
Cruelty And The Beast) minus the atmosphere, plus the token ehru melody near the end. On the short “Venom In My Veins” the band belts it out
Thornography-style (i. e. in a black metalcore-ish kind of way) with the oriental influence completely AWOL. And on “The Aroused” the band starts with a slow doom metal sound (not unlike what Dani and the boys did on
Nymphetamine’s “Nemesis”) before speeding up and sounding just like the rest of the album.
Of course, the album has a few good points. Axe-man Jesse Liu is more skilled and technical than the average black metal guitarist, playing some pretty interesting leads and riffs, like in “Hearts Condemned” and the thrashy “Sing Ling Temple.” The bass, unlike in
Seediq Bale, is actually audible at times. And vocalist/ehru-ist Freddy Lim (who wants to sound like Dani Filth but physically looks like Marilyn Manson) manages to squeeze some neat melodies out of his unorthodox instrument, even if they sometimes sound out of place in the songs. Also, his lyrics are fortunately still about Taiwanese culture, not about vampires and vaginas.
Mirror Of Retribution is by no means a bad album. It can actually be really enjoyable if one refrains from comparing it to other works. However, this band is capable of so much more. When I heard
Seediq Bale for the first time, I wanted this band to start phasing out the cheesy keyboards and cheap overused blast beats and letting the ehru and the oriental atmosphere take over for their next album. It is sad to see that the band did the exact opposite with this record. Here’s to hoping that the band realizes this mistake and their next effort is more about what makes them Chthonic and less about what makes them a black metal band.
