OneMetal.com music REVIEW:
Vampillia – Rule The World/Deathtiny Land

And now for something completely different. As you sit here clicking through the music pages of OneMetal, you’ll be overrun with reviews of the latest black metal behemoths and harbingers of doom. So how about something alternative? How about some classical music?

Admittedly, the classical element is steeped in metal but it’s still slightly different to the scores of Scandinavian death metal acts you’ve been reading about. They’re from Japan for one thing. Vampillia are the self-proclaimed originators of brutal orchestra, which is the best way to describe their music. The madcap eleven-piece feature three vocalists, a string section, guitars, turntables, bass and percussion. It’s like Arcade Fire discovered death metal.

Their album Rule The World/Deathtiny Land is the 24 track opus which only comes in at 25 minutes in length. It tells two stories throughout its short runtime; one of a man’s ambition and struggle to dominate and rule the world and another story of the man who conquered the world building his own twisted theme park on the site of another (cough, Disneyland, cough).

Opening track ‘One Day I Thought This World Should Be Mine/Welcome To Deathtiny Land’ is a great piece of classical music. It’s both soothing and chilling, creating the imagery of a dark and evil fairy tale whilst building up and up the momentum gearing up for the mindfuck you’re about to witness.

It’s the audio equivalent of a nightmare, albeit a carefully constructed nightmare. It’s at times whimsical and operatic, but it can also be thrashy, doomy and nonsensical. The music appears to be played out of time at various moments and the vocals clash with each other leading to an almost unbearable mesh of noise – imagine Lightning Bolt discovering opera.

Some tracks aren’t random and crazed attempts to scare the listener, tracks such as ‘I’m Completely Lost Here Now/Peabrain Pan’s Flight’ are reminiscent of the music from early horror flicks, except with a doomier edge.

The main drawback with the album, though, isn’t the music – it’s the vocals. Having three vocalists can be a challenge for any band, but having three radically contrasting styles of voice often resorts in disaster. The inane warbling of Velladon seems out of place in most songs, ‘Huge Ambition And Indiscriminant Mass Murder/Slash Mountains’ starts as a decent metal number until the vocalists appear to start competing with each other for the listener’s attention.

Rule The World/Deathtiny Land is a journey through the deranged psyche of eleven Japanese musicians. The mix of metal and classical holds its own throughout the album, but the vocals can ruin it. The mixture of opera with snarls and growls has the potential to work well, but when they’re both struggling to be the main focal point of a song, something needs to change.

Vampillia’s Myspace: http://www.myspace.com/vampilliaofficial
Code666 Records’ Website: http://www.code666.net

Bottom Line

There are some fantastic musical moments on this album, but they're sadly counter-acted by the awkward vocal combo and reverting to a crazed noise at every opportunity.