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Track Listing: The Island Legacy Of The Seediq Takao Oceanquake Southern Cross Kaoru Broken Jade Root Regeneration Mahakala Quell The Souls In Sing Ling Temple

Taiwanese metal warriors Chthonic are back with their sixth studio album Takasago Army. As far as the background story behind this album is concerned, it completes a trilogy of sorts, as there is clearly a connection with the subject matter of the previous two albums "Mirror Of Retribution" and "Seediq Bale". In the interview I did with her, bassist Doris Yeh talks in detail about this story, but the standout feature in these three albums, specially in this album, is that the story is not just meant for lyrical purposes. The band has made the effort to use traditional Taiwanese and Japanese instruments to convey this story to their listeners.

Taking the story into consideration, "The Island" turns out to be just about the perfect build up this album could have hoped for, laden with nothing other than traditional instruments. From then on, this album just goes from strength to strength, delivering one solid tune after another in an incredibly exotic manner. Having said that, the exotic nature of the album certainly does not take away its brutality even one bit, as every song is hard-hitting and gives the listeners very little chance to recover. It's musically a very rich album, and it's the kind of album in which the listener can find something new with every subsequent listen, provided he or she pays adequate attention to what the various musical layers are made up of.

As you can tell from the huge variety of bands I've been covering on my website, I am hugely open-minded to all styles of hard rock and heavy metal. But when it comes to extreme metal, black metal to be more precise, I'm not really the biggest fan of the sub-genre and it takes something rather special for me to even listen to a black metal album more than once or twice. Chthonic have definitely come up with that 'something special'. I don't find any shortcomings in Takasago Army, not even a single one, and this is one album I'll most gladly be listening to repeatedly for a long time to come.

Besides the excellent new music, Chthonic have decidedly undergone a change in their own image, a much needed one in my opinion. They have decided to shed the corpse paint, and now whenever they step onto a stage to perform, they merely paint their traditional symbols on themselves while donning military style outfits to go with the theme of the album. I'm extremely glad that they've stopped with the usage of corpse paint, because it is a huge step towards avoiding the Scandinavian black metal stereotype. I've never been a fan of bands putting on corpse paint either, because I feel it takes away from the intensity of the music to a certain extent and almost makes the musicians look like clowns or cartoons. Besides, it must have gotten tedious in case of Chthonic to put on both the corpse paint along with the symbols every night of a tour, so it's great that they don't have to worry about that aspect of it and now they can lay more focus on crushing audiences the world over with their tremendous music.

Chthonic have undoubtedly raised their level of musicianship with this release, and it comes as highly recommended from me to any heavy metal fan. I prefer to listen to whole albums at a time rather than separate songs, so it's always hard for me to pick favorites, and in this case it's even harder because right from the start to its final moments, the album flows brilliantly well and has a firm grip on the listener. So I would say just go out and buy the album. Screw torrent downloads, screw Spotify, and screw the online streams. Instead, support the artists like Chthonic because of whom you get to enjoy great music of this high calibre.

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