(written by Islander)
The best anime death metal from China! That sounds like a narrow niche, doesn’t it? It’s also a description that leaves some big unanswered questions about what the music sounds like – questions we will help answer today.
But first, there’s a question about the meaning of this band’s name – Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship. They have answered that question: “The band name ‘Itatrain’ actually comes from a viral 2012 incident in Shanghai: a fan was caught kneeling and worshipping a train decorated with ‘LoveLive!’ characters. We thought that kind of fanaticism was both stupid and hilarious at the time, so we decided to name the band after it.”
The LoveLive! multimedia anime universe has also played a role in the music of Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship. Their vocalist Kiryu Zhang admits that “on our previous efforts, people probably saw us as just that ‘weird anime slam band’ sampling LoveLive! for shock value.” But what began as a “meme” bedroom project has survived for a decade, and the music has considerably evolved as well.
Perhaps one sign of that is the fact that it’s our site that was invited to premiere the band’s new album, 2D Complex (二次元コンプレックス), in advance of its July 10 release by Stillbirth Records and Gore House Productions.
L-R – Zen (Bass) | Shiru (Drums) | Kiryu Zhang (Vocals) | Xenochrist (Guitar) | Khezk (Composer) – photo by Wendy
Other signs have been available too, as the band have toured toured extensively across China, Japan, and Europe, and have appeared on the stages of numerous European metal festivals. And we have this further statement from Kiryu Zhang:
[W]hile making 2D Complex over the last two years, what I want to express has become much more honest and personal. This album is a collection of different interpretations of Otaku culture—the hikikomori anxiety, the rejection of reality, and the process of finding sanctuary in 2D worlds. It’s not just about memes anymore; it’s a real state of mind.
I wanted to create a record that you listen to from front to back, not just a bunch of singles thrown together. We’ve crammed things like J-pop, Blackgaze, and Japanese folk—stuff that shouldn’t really fit—into a Slam framework, but every shift is there to make that ‘distorted vibe’ feel complete. The structures are more complex and diverse than before, but the core is still pure violence and depression. I want fans to walk away feeling our perspective: colorful, but completely nihilistic.
You’re going to hear pure, neck-snapping Slam riffs, but we also threw in a lot of our own private stashes, everything from J-pop and Blackgaze to Japanese folk. We brought in friends from all over the world to help us finish this, and I want every track to be something that sticks with you. Bottom line: this is an album that refuses to be boring.
Regarding those guest appearances, they include Andrew Lee from Ripped To Shreds, Akihiro Muto from Agent 0, Yui from Earthists, Alan Grnja from Distant, Matt Yakesh from No Face No Case, Yanchi from 5PM Promise, and Niik from Pale.
As for the music on the new album, Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship jam nine songs into a 30-minute run-time, and it’s definitely not boring, even for people like us here at NCS who are, shall we say, not well-versed in anime and only infrequently delve into slam. A key reason for the lack of boredom is that the songs are so different from each other; moving from one to the next is an adventure.
To be sure, Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship provide frequent reminders about their attraction to brutal slamming death metal, beginning with the album’s opening anime-referencing song, “Lucky☆Star“. It fires the drums like an automatic weapon and ejects riffage that maniacally swarms and squeals, but then lowers the boom with punishing pile-driver blows (though the guitars also continue to screech), and then lowers it again in even more catastrophic fashion, coupled with gruesome growls, pig squeals, and crazed howls.
As the album evolves, the band continue clobbering listeners and doing their best to pound us ever deeper into the ground, but even more so they also continue injecting other head-spinning and quirky surprises.
“Slamonogatari“, for example, slowly drops humongous bombs early on but also convulses, gallops, feverishly slashes, blisters, and closes with an Andrew Lee guitar solo that’s proggy and jazzy and thoroughly jubilant (with a tinkling piano near the very end).
The mosh-inducer “Brutal Panzer Standard Slam” includes its own bits of jazzy melody and simmering strings in the midst of multiple fretwork freakouts and depth-charge detonations; “Twisted Light” is glitchy, spasmodic, and vocally monstrous but includes xylophone melody; and “苦痛昇天” (“Ascension in Agony”) dances, darts, and includes a guest vocal appearance whose ardent yells come close to singing, but the music also gets very bleak and hallucinatory.
To pick a few more examples of the album’s extravagant twists, “Utsushiyo” is a completely absorbing and beautifully performed piano instrumental that brings Gershwin to mind, while “Yomi” includes solemn Japanese folk elements but is also frighteningly ferocious.
And we’ll yield the floor once more to Kiryu Zhang for his thoughts about the closing song “約束“:
The title of this song means “promise”.This is the track I put the most heart into. I tried to fit Slam riffs into a Blackgaze/Screamo framework. NIIK (from Pale) killed it with the spoken word, and combined with the atmospheric synths, it’s the final chapter of farewell and self-destruction.
To return to where we were up above: 2D Channel does deliver brutal slamming death metal, but only in relatively small fractions of the time. For most of the time, Dehumanizing Itatrain Worship demonstrate that their musical interests and performance skills are vastly wider, and that their songwriting is adventurously experimental.
Or to get even more succinct, the album is just a hell of a lot of head-spinning fun, even for someone like this writer who knows zilch about anime and only occasionally dabbles in brutal slamming death. So although many of our regular visitors are likely to be skeptical, maybe you should give it a chance too?
Find pre-orders via the links below. The labels recommend the album for fans of Ingested, Vulvodynia, Within Destruction, 花冷え。, and Maximum The Hormone.
PRE-ORDER:
https://stillbirthrecords.bandcamp.com/album/2d-complex
https://gorehouseproductions.com/
DEHUMANIZING ITATRAIN WORSHIP:
https://dehuitaworship.bandcamp.com/
https://www.facebook.com/DehumanizingItatrainWorship/