Artist: Vampilla
Title: Rule The World / Deathtiny Land
Type: Album
Label: Code 666

Japan’s own “brutal orchestra” Vampillia are crazy. Utterly batshit crazy. The eleven-man strong ensemble from Osaka fuse classical music, punk, black metal and noise, often in the same song, with exceptional skill and prowess. The result is one album with two titles, twenty-four songs with forty-eight titles and forty-eight minutes off gob-smacked audible dementia.

This bizarre creature starts off with the sumptuous classical strains of ‘One day, I thought this world should be mine’ and ‘Made my mind to dominate the world with no doubt and fresh feeling’ before fading into the schizophrenic ‘Day of Departure, be a devil has no mercy and just move forward’. The band’s three-pronged vocal attack adds frantic urgency to the songs as they alternate betweens opera, hardcore and death metal styles over a barrage of various strings, guitars, electronics, piano and drums. The shortness of the songs merely adds to the confusion as the focus is drawn away from individual tacks and onto the piece as a whole.

A person could go crazy trying to break down these songs into their component parts for analysis and trying to fit them back together into some logical syntax. But as a listening experience ‘Rule The World/Deathtiny Land’ will no doubt divide people. There is no denying the skill of Vampillia as musicians, but to enjoy this you’ll have to be as crazy as they are… It’s probably a bad sign then that I really like this then…

http://www.vampillia.com

Sean M. Palfrey

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