siLLy puPPy One of the many Chinese bands joining the ranks of the metal world in modern times, 守夜者 which means Guardians of the Night in English formed all the way back in 2003 in the city of Zhengzhou in Henan province in China. Despite having been together closing in on 20 years, this band took a long time to release anything with its debut EP titled 恶嗔 (Anger) with four tracks coming out in 2017 and this full-length debut 冥河之沙 which translates into Sand of the Styx finally seeing a release in 2019.

This band plays a style of keyboard-soaked melodic death metal in the style of Finland’s Children of Bodom with lots of Western classically infused keyboard melodies along with a rampaging death metal accompaniment that features a vocal style that sounds a lot like Dr. Mikannibal of the Japanese band Sigh. The band has the lineup of 王鹏 Wang Peng (bass), 宋丹 Song Dan (guitar), 黄乐 Huang Le (guitar), 吕鸿基 Lu Hongji (keyboards), 三儿 Saner (keyboards), 王琪 Wang Qi (vocals) and 洲洲 Zhouzhou (drums, 2019-present).

Unlike almost all Chinese metal bands that look westward for inspiration with aspirations of capturing a world market, 守夜者 Guardians of the Night is reaching for a homegrown market by singing and marketing itself exclusively in the Mandarin Chinese market which considering roughly one seventh of humanity resides within this one nation’s borders, may not be a bad strategy! 冥河之沙 Sand of the Styx sounds to my well-trained Western ears to be a fairly typical example of melo-death metal with a heavy emphasis on the keyboards which offer completely different melodic counterparts to the guitar riffs. Melodies are mined from Western classical artists such as Frederik Chopin to Scandinavian folk music that sounds a lot like Ensiferum or the aforementioned Children of Bodom at times.

This album has eight tracks that add up to 42 minutes of playing time with the highlight being the tight instrumental interplay especially in the excellent twin guitar attacks but all in all the keyboards tend to dwell in the epic soundtrack mode of modern video games and HBO theme songs. While not bad per se, there is a lot of time that this kind of melo-death sounds a bit cheesy and there is no attention paid to the dynamics and tempo changes that are required to bring this sort of hybridization of genres to life in the vein of the Western bands that provided the inspiration. Overall this is a decent album especially coming from a city in China few Westerners have heard of (despite the city having a population of over 10 million) however this being a Western style of music, it just doesn’t resonate on a very captivating level. The band needs to learn how to add more variation to the tracks which all start sounding samey half way through the album. The musicianship is excellent but the delivery is a bit meh.