Band:	Vengeful Spectre
Album:	Vengeful Spectre II
Style:	Black metal, Folk metal
Release date:	June 2023

01. 暗雲 Beneath Dark Clouds
02. 鏖戰 Storming Insurrection Of War
03. 赤塵 Blood And Ashes
04. 凶山 Ghostly Mountains
05. 幽夢 Abyssal Nightmare
06. 殇刃 Broken Blade

The vengeful spectre is back with a lust for death.

And I don't necessarily mean that from a story-wise perspective, as you might remember the narrative form our review of their debut held. I was thinking of following in the footsteps of that review but I figured I would've just half assed a story without really saying much about the album since I'm not really in a narrative mood. So instead let's talk about east asian metal. I was doing a bit of a dive in seeing just how many bands I knew from that part of the world and I figured out that Japan pretty much dominates the share of the metal market, and countries like China, India, and Indonesia, despite being countries with huge populations don't have the proportional impact in music on a global scale. Even outside of metal, K-Pop and J-Pop far outweigh C-Pop for example. That isn't to say that there is no metal scene over there. China has older bands like Tang Dynasty and bands that have achieved some moderate success like Tengger Cavalry, but also most of the Chinese bands that I've gotten to know came due to the- Jiangxi-based Pest Productions label.

Therefore Vengeful Spectre is technically only the second Pest Productions released Chinese metal I've reviewed this year. That's a very welcome pattern. Coming back to Vengeful Spectre, their debut self-titled album was a really neat revelation in Chinese metal, being the kind of very aggressive yet still melodic black metal that was imbued with Chinese Folk music and some of the hardest hitting shrieks out there. The very anticipated follow-up shifts gears a little bit because it doesn't feel like black metal is the main element anymore despite still being very present. Hence why my teaser mentioned "death", as it feels like death and also particularly death doom have a greater share of the sound. The shrieks, still hard hitting as ever, are contrasted with some lower growls, and the tempos feel more comfortable going into mid-paced and even slow-paced territories.

The folk side of the album is still mostly relegated to the very edges, in the intro track and the way it transitions in the first song proper, and I feel like the wind instrument that opens up "鏖戰 Storming Insurrection of War" may be just a bit too loud in the mix. Overall I wish they had a bit more of a presence in the album as a whole the way that they seep into "幽夢 Abyssal Nightmare", arguably the most well-developed song of them all, with the slowest doom and the longest runtime; but they're most present in the atmospheric closer "殇刃 Broken Blade". The songs themselves were already pretty long (6-8 minutes range) on their debut, but here thing are pushed even further with most of the tracks almost reaching or surpassing the 8 minute mark.

Expanding the sound palette in what is advertised as the second part of a trilogy is a pretty nice move, even if I feel like the execution at points needs some polish, gives me a lot of expectations about how things would develop on the trilogy's closer. Whatever the case, Chinese metal's presence on the map is only getting more noticeable.