Xinteng 心疼 is the second LP from the Taiwanese black metal project Laang 冷. The band started in 2018 as a one-person band and solo endeavor envisioned as a way to capture and expiate the echoes and visions that the group’s founding member 楊海濤 experienced while in a coma.
His deep slumber was allegedly the result of having been shot in the head during a car jacking. While in this trauma-induced and insensible state 楊海濤 claims to have entered a world that was “beyond hell,” a haunted realm he returned from with the sound of an inconsolable, baying howl ringing in his brain like the din of a great iron bell. He now bequeaths to you this sorrowful gift, a sound he calls “terror black metal.”
Xinteng 心疼 translates to “Distressed” in English, a name that the album lives up to through a combination of severe and provocative elements. This is an incredibly clean-sounding record; even the distortion sounds polished and unsullied. Further, it pulls heavily from the worlds of death metal and hardcore punk, favoring ripping, forceful blast beats and meaty, physically imposing grooves combined with mathy tremolos of the post-hardcore variety.
The vocal work is unyielding and dynamically emotive, having more than a swabbing patina of Jacob Bannon’s toothy snarl to its throat-spasming bark. Black metal is a genre with a long tradition of palpable aggression, with earlier pioneers in the field preferred garish, Grand-Guignol and camp, while the second wavers embodied the fury of a feral animal whose den had just been invaded or a vengeful spirit whose resting place had been carelessly disturbed.
楊海濤 on Xinteng is an altogether different breed of demon. In the blighted sanctum, he has raised, 楊海濤 is an afreet with a dark vision, whose insights pierce the veil of our reality like a machete gliding through a deerskin, the fat and fur separating in a heralding, vulgar divulgence of the dismal fate that awaits you in the twilight of an eternal night.
You can buy and stream Xinteng 心疼 below via Bandcamp:
