For fans of extreme metal, Ripped to Shreds checks a lot of important boxes. Crushing, heavily distorted guitars and bass tones? Check. A mix of aggression and melody in the riffwork? Check. Thrilling and consistently satisfying harsh vocals? Check. Intricate and impressive drums that still carry a coherent sonic narrative? Check. It’s aces all around for these guys, and that’s certainly true of the band’s latest album, Sanshi.
At a high-level, the band’s sound has deep roots in Entombed’s Left Hand Path and Dismember’s Like An Everflowing Stream, both in terms of the guitar sound and the structure and cadence of the songwriting. That said, however, they are far from a HM-2 retread act, and transcend the glut of the many examples that have proliferated over the last decade. Rather, the band sets this as the foundation on which to erect stylistic flourishes that recall bands like Intestine Baalism and Vehemence in some moments, Bolt Thrower and Edge of Sanity in others. The band also exhibits a good aptitude for rip-and-tear grinding sections as well as more hook-laden melodic passages. In other words, their sound is everything you’d hope for in straightforward, modern death metal.
It’s a style that requires zero “warming up to.” If you like death metal, you should like this.
The album opens with “Into the Court of Yanluowang,” which actually does remind me of the opening salvo of “Left Hand Path” as well. But the song is very much its own beast, its six-minute runtime allowing the band to spread its black wings to their full extent. The song is the perfect opener, as it shows the various moods and tempos the band can bring to the table. I especially love the riff that kicks in at 2:40, and I bet it’s fun as hell to play too! The song is brutal, exhilarating, and haunting in equal measure, a difficult mix for most bands to master.
Other highlights include the guitar heroics on “燒冥紙 (Sacrificial Fire),” which add the ideal contrast to an otherwise pure crusher of a song. I also really dig the extra-fast blasting on “Feast of the Deceased,” along with the impressive picking technique used on the guitars in several parts. It’s a song that contains lots of dynamics while still destroying everything in its path.
However, I think “殭屍復活 (Horrendous Corpse Resurrection)” might be the real banger of the record. This will be the one that gets the pit moving and people’s heads banging the most. Like the album’s opening track, this song has everything the band does so well, this time packed into an efficient three minutes of death-grinding bliss. It’s like Scream Bloody Gore had a kid with War Master and then somehow some genetics from Onset of Putrefaction got spliced in there somehow. Listen to the solo and you’ll get what I mean.
But calling out highlights for this record might come across as a little misleading, as the album really doesn’t have any blemishes. Perhaps there’s some predictability after a while, but you come to an album like this for a reason. Additionally, the band delves into a lot of fascinating subject matter like Chinese folklore and Taiwanese funeral rites that have gone unexplored among many of their peers. Death metal is an oversaturated medium nowadays, and Ripped to Shreds is one of the true standouts.
