芒刺

Thorn is… a very strange album.

Tang Dynasty had spent their whole career prior to this release, from Dream Return through Epic to Romantic Knight, in honing a unique and signature style of heavy metal which drew influences equally from Chinese art music, classic heavy metal and progressive rock. Not for nothing have they been considered the heavyweights in the world of Chinese metal.

But Thorn takes a hell of a Great Leap off onto the side-road of alternative music. Some of the songs they play here are easily the heaviest they’ve yet done. But the flavour is very, very different from any of their three previous. Yes, you’ve still got the operatic vocals and Ding Wu’s signature high wails on ‘Tears of the Elk’ – a song which loudly and proudly kicks ass, by the way. You’ve still got the mix of electric rock instruments and traditional folk instruments which is the band’s hallmark.

But there’s also some overpowering groove metal and melodeath influences on ‘Thorn’ and the instrumental ‘Water Lily’. There are jazz and funk-fusion influences as well. Were you on a Mordred binge before you wrote ‘Elephants Don’t Complain’ and ‘Ups and Downs’, 哥們? (Check me for a trunk, ‘cuz I can’t complain about that: Mordred slay.) There’s also a hell of a lot of electronic sampling and some creepy New Age / ambient sound effects spliced into some tracks alongside the dizi and guqin, like ‘Plum Gift’ (with even a little bit of blippy-bloopy for a fadeout) and ‘Purple Leaf’, which sounds almost like it was written as an alternate track for the tripped-out 1995 SNES game EarthBound. The effects on these songs are meant to be discomforting and disorienting.

So… I don’t think the formula here always works, hence the mediocre score. But there’s a feat which Tang Dynasty manage to pull off here that is quite admirable. They do all of this alternative experimentation in style without ever ceasing to sound like Tang Dynasty. You can tell that’s Ding Wu on vocals, that’s clearly Zhao Nian on drums, that’s clearly Gu Zhong working the bass like a caffeine-buzzed hummingbird on ‘Thorn’. They’re not throwing down empty wagers on their reputations as rock artists; and they’re not throwing everything at the wall and seeing what sticks. There’s a logic to what they’re doing. And they never lose their musical identity.

Thorn’s lyrics are practically Nuclear Assault or Rage-esque in terms of how angrily political and left-wing they are. Hell, the cover even has a wiry underdog Asian arm arm-wrestling with a clearly beefier, more muscular white arm: the implication being that what he’s throwing out here is a direct challenge to the American- and English-led West. This implication gets way clearer when you watch the MV for ‘Thorn’. True, Tang Dynasty’s always been left-wing; remember ‘The Internationale’ from their debut album? But right from the get-go on the title track, Ding Wu is clearly angry at the capitalist oil politics and foreign invasions and interventions by America in the Middle East as of 2013 and a long time before, decrying our ‘hypocritical lies’, our ‘dictatorial laws’ and our ‘plunder and greed’ in the Holy Land.

To be fair, a lot of people were pretty angry at American politics at the time (and probably still should be), around the world. And considering that Ding Wu and guitarist Chen Lei had just come back from a trip to the Middle East to study the region’s folk music and instruments before they started making Thorn, this is understandable. Tang Dynasty has long had world influences: for example, the Dream Return song ‘Sun’ and the Romantic Knight number ‘Pathway’ were inspired by a trip Ding Wu took to Tashkurgan, and the hospitality and flute-and-strings music of the Sarikoli people he met there while backpacking and hitchhiking. In a certain sense, Tang Dynasty’s music is all about China’s traditional cosmopolitanism and about these cross-cultural Silk Road influences.

But it isn’t just America that Ding is angry with on Thorn. He’s angry about environmental destruction for development in his own country as well, and the extinction of various kinds of wildlife. He’s angry about the air pollution in Beijing, and also about the ‘spiritual pollution’ in Chinese society that has everyone chasing after money instead of looking after what is beautiful in this life. One sees this readily in the lyrics for many of the songs on Thorn, which openly and angrily decry these kinds of moral numbness and hypocrisy. A lot of the song titles (‘Crosswalk’ = lit. zebra crossing; ‘Elephants Don’t Complain’, ‘Tears of the Elk’, ‘Rattlesnake’, even ‘Thorn’ and ‘Purple Leaf’) are named after animals or things from nature. ‘Purple Leaf’, which listens like a Japanese postmodern art-rock track, is particularly insistent in drawing our attention to the disconnects between nature and man-made environments, the world of trains and stereos and computers vs. the world of rainforests and tree frogs and chirping insects.

It’s kind of a testament to the power of metal and rock music as an outlet for these kinds of protests against an uncaring world, and of course Ding Wu just comes off in interviews on Chinese TV as being this genuine, well-grounded, happy guy—loves his wife and daughter and all that. But that doesn’t mean he doesn’t pay attention to what’s happening in the world, and that doesn’t mean he doesn’t have anything to say about it. And I’m glad that music does afford him the opportunity to speak his mind freely.

So… final verdict. Thorn isn’t an album that gets a lot of replays for me. I’ve got a general strangeness threshold which they certainly manage to cross. On the other hand, Thorn also isn’t bad music, and it’s an album that I’m glad exists. The fact that Tang Dynasty is comfortable enough to put this one out, and wager some part of their reputation on an experiment that they clearly believed in, is worthy of some kudos.

14 / 20