浪漫骑士

This album, Romantic Knight, is actually my personal favourite among Tang Dynasty’s repertoire, and it’s the album of theirs that I keep coming back to on my playlist. It’s difficult to explain why. The first album takes a daring approach to blending hard rock and heavy metal with Chinese art music, and it’s a stunning freshman effort that sounds every bit as awesome now as I’m sure it did when it first came out. And the second album takes a progressive approach which is very different from the first album but which is still monumentally impressive. How to justify my preference for this album in Tang Dynasty’s oeuvre?

I think that can be summed up in one word: emotion.

This album has a melancholy to it, a deep reserve of feeling that gets poured forth into practically every song. The first two albums have feeling as well, but it’s nowhere near as concentrated as it is here. Listen to those first three songs here in particular: ‘Screaming Train’, ‘Joyful Sorrow’ and ‘Romantic Knight’. It’s as if Ding Wu, Chen Lei and Lao Wu are trying to engage the listener in particular, starting off by telling them ‘you’ve also got the same moonlight glimmer, the same childhood memory, the same shining kind heart, the same hopeless despair’. This is very much so a personal album, but it is speaking to a condition that many people in 2008 China were feeling.

I was there with ‘em, in Beijing prior to the 2008 Olympics. I was an exchange student back then, true, ‘too young, too simple, sometimes naïve’. But even I noticed the difference in the landscape between when I arrived in September 2006 and when I left in July 2007. All too many Beijingers were watching the beautiful, traditional elements of their built world, the Old Beijing that dates back to the Mongol invasion in the 1200s, being (in many cases often literally) torn up to make way for these big-ass glass-and-steel office parks, hotels, mega-malls. Romantic Knight came out in the wake of that, trying to capture both the hope and the grief that many people were feeling at the time over these developments.

The emotion isn’t sentimental or maudlin: Ding Wu’s singing about a real place and a real sense of loss. And in the end, it’s the ordinary everyday people who have suffered this loss who are the ‘romantic knights’ for Tang Dynasty. ‘Just let[ting] the cold fragments of the past fill my soul’ and ‘just let[ting] the reality and persistence of the heartache move my tears’… but also acknowledging the ‘ordinary unsung heroes’ that have not just preserved these fragments and heartache, but ‘paved the way with steel’ into the world we inhabit now: that’s what the album is about, right there.

And it’s about much more than that. I’ve barely even scouted out the tip of the iceberg, here. Romantic Knight is rich with allusions to classical poetry, religious and philosophical works. ‘Romantic Knight’ references Don Quixote, a figure who is similarly out of time and whose condition provokes both humour and sorrow. ‘Drunken Madness’ is a metal setting of a tune of the same name by Ruan Ji, one of the Seven Sages of the Bamboo Grove during the Three Kingdoms era. ‘Ritual of Apotheosis’ takes its main text from the Book of Changes. And ‘Song of the Gale’ is named after a poem by Liu Bang, the founder of the Han Dynasty. I know for a fact that there are way more and deeper allusions than these, but these are the ones which leap out to me.

Musically, Romantic Knight threads a careful and narrow line between the folk-instrument infused ‘eavy rock of Dream Return, and the Metallica- and Dream Theater-inspired progressive metal stylings of Epic. So we do get to hear the traditional folk instruments: the dizi and erhu on ‘Drunken Madness’; the Sarikoli Tajik-influenced folk drums and acoustic strings on ‘Pathway’; the understated guqin intro and jingju-style vocal passages that distinctly recall Dream Return on ‘Ritual of Apotheosis’; the reverbed-out intro to ‘Song of the Gale’. In addition to this, we also hear these attempts to use the electric guitar and bass as though they were folk instruments, particularly on the title track and ‘Retrospect’, the former of which seems to aim after a clean, classical-guitar sound which is still noticeably electric, and the latter of which seems to try to get erhu and guqin-reminiscent sounds out of the main guitar.

But there’s plenty of heaviness to be heard on here, too. ‘Romantic Knight’ is a slow burn, but it builds to a fist-pumping head-banging crescendo toward the end. And ‘Ritual of Apotheosis’, which draws a deliberate tension between traditional instrumentation and glitzy jangly modern urban sounds, rides itself out on a classic riff that you can’t help but crack a smile at.

There are a couple of stumbles, but nothing which disrupts the overall flow or feeling of the album. ‘Oath’ and ‘Desperate Lies’ can take some getting used to, for example, with their math-rock rhythms and deliberate vocal discordances. But patience has its rewards, and even those songs have catchy-as-fuck bridges and blister-breaking guitar solos which make distinct growers of them. I would also cite the karaoke bonus-track versions of ‘Joyful Sorrow’ and ‘Romantic Knight’ as possible stumbles, since they just seem kind of gratuitous and pointless. They’re excellent songs, though, so even this is forgivable to an extent.

Again, even though I would cite both Dream Return and Epic as must-listen metal classics, in the end I think Romantic Knight is actually the best album among the three. It’s a mature band hitting its stride in the best possible way, and going for that extra erg of emotion to hone the edge of their metal.

19 / 20