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RIPPED TO SHREDS “Sanshi”
RIPPED TO SHREDS “Sanshi”
By Dr. Abner Mality
When it comes to grisly visions of Hell and the afterlife, Chinese mythology takes a back seat to nobody. Those places are teeming with legions of demons and flesh-eating ghouls who delight in tormenting human souls. Pretty good inspiration for a grinding death metal band! And RIPPED TO SHREDS is here to fulfill than inspiration.
It is one of several projects helmed by Taiwanese guitar maestro Andrew Lee, who also heads up the anime-obsessed grindcore band HOUKAGO GRIND TIME and the MORBID ANGEL worshipping AZATH. I just reviewed the new HOUKAGO GRIND TIME effort a couple of weeks ago and I am now struck by how hard Lee works to make each band distinct. HGT is definitely the more punky and blasting of the two, sticking to the elder tenets of grindcore. RIPPED TO SHREDS is more epic and death metal infused, although there are certainly grinding passages here, too. The production is very different, with HGT having a pinging drum sound while RTS sounds richer and more precise overall. The HGT songs seem ready to fly off the handle at any second, while the tunes on “Sanshi” are much more composed.
I prefer RTS by a pretty wide margin. The album opens with its most epic track, “In the Court of Yanluowang”, which runs over six minutes...which would easily encapsulate at least 3 HGT tracks. IMMOLATION, early DEATH and BENEDICTION seem to be prominent influences and that’s for sure no hindrance for me. Lee and his crew are on the attack constantly here and there are riffs aplenty to discover in “Feast of the Deceased”, “Living In Effigy” and more. The flow is steady and the energy does not abate throughout the album. The drum sound is thankfully much better than the HGT skins and we don’t get any of the silly anime samples, either.
Many of the song titles are written in Chinese characters, a typical RTS motif, and it’s clear Lee takes his Chinese mythology seriously. Every tune here deals either with death or Hell. “Sanshi” refers to ghostly worm-like creatures that dwell inside every human being, urging them to do evil. Spiritual parasites, in other words...a great subject for a death metal album. For any fan of classic morbid DM with a touch of grind, “Sanshi” should burrow its way into their brain.
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