勝利萬歲 / Long Live Victory
Out 27th March on Pest Productions
Xiamen’s Holyarrow delve into 20th Century history for their fourth and latest album ‘勝利萬歲’ (Long Live Victory), which sees them revamp their take on epic black metal into a militaristic sonic rendering appropriate for the mass mobilisations that defined the run up to Chinese independence. Theirs’ has always been a proudly heavy metal infused take on black metal, with pieces orientating around a strongly defined melodic core, lyrical solos, and strikingly anthemic link passages.
Here, we see much the same format, but with a marked emphasis on a persistent rhythmic urgency, frantic punk breaks, and a decidedly more aggressive demeanour. The pieces are lengthy but frantic, calling to mind early Abigor for their sudden bursts of frenetic, choppy melodicism broken up by reflective moments of sombre ballading. But where Abigor exercised an explicit medievalism, Holyarrow leverage the euphoric, cinematic soundscaping of classic heavy metal as a form of commentary on the near limitless violence of the pure black metal passages.
Tracks like ‘吾之榮耀即吾之忠誠’ (My Honour Is My Loyalty) explicitly toy with the inherent utilitarianism of punk to deliver sharp, invigorating messages akin to political proselytising with a direct, repetitive rhythmic core. The harsh vocals matching the contours of the simple, sequential rock DNA of the rhythm section. These are juxtaposed against a more sophisticated heavy metal architecture, with black metal playing the backseat role of midwife in bringing the inherent militarism behind the music to bear.
The majority of riffs take the form of revolutionary ballads, transposing choral music to the rhythm guitar as a foundation for more metallic harmonic interjections. Backing vocals make this explicit as they take up the mantle of the lead guitar in offering further harmonic levers to pull on in a sharp antidote to the clean vocals. Whilst this serves Holyarrow’s thematic material well, it places a clear limit on the appeal that this album will hold for listeners looking to encounter a purer black metal experience. By building these pieces around a central theme that is primarily lyrical, it creates a limited, almost cyclical straightjacket, saddling any development with the need to make reference to this central theme. In this sense, the purely black metal elements serve as mere flavour for what is essentially a heavy metal offering strongly informed by the immediacy of punk.
That being said, in terms of metal albums attempting something similar – particularly those so clearly wedded to their thematic and conceptual furniture – Holyarrow stand apart as uniquely creative and competent. But there is a disconnected, almost episodic structure to the majority of these pieces, one that takes on the same contours as a musical or opera, as themes recapitulate like returning characters only tangentially linked at the level of raw composition. The pieces therefore lack the flow that can only come from the pure musical naturalism of black metal.
That aside, Holyarrow have achieved what few of their contemporaries can even approach. ‘Long Live Victory’ successfully strips back the “epic” qualities of their previous work, a latent feature inherent to a deeper, folk orientated historicity. A sharp, confident militarism emerges to replace this, one that retains a sense of grand narrative whilst referencing democratic forms of music to bring these populist moments of Chinese history into sharper focus.
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