Over the past few decades, the Chinese have often created replicas of things other nations did before them. Sometimes, they might even have done it better. While metalheads in the United States and Europe have been headbanging to Black Sabbath or Judas Priest in the 1970s already, it wasn’t until the 90s that the Chinese began swaying their heads to the same sort of music. Now in 2012, metal China wants the world to know how far they’ve come: They have released a free sampler titled Core In China, consisting of 20 tracks by all-Chinese metal bands, with genres ranging from deathcore and metalcore to post-hardcore, and well, Nintendocore pretty much goes without saying, geographically stretching Taiwan to Chengu in the West of China.
The idea was created by the people from Rock In China, a non-profit project that focuses on the independent music scene in China. Core in China shows a variety of influences of Swedish, American or British metal bands before them. In fact, many of them don’t sound too different from what’s going on over here.
They want people to see it as a status quo of the current underground scene in China, but “underground” and “Chinese metal” being what they are, you probably haven’t heard of any of the bands; or even if you have heard of them, you’ll have to be able to read Chinese to understand the titles of some of their tracks. But if you want to get a bit of an idea of the current metal scene in China, this is a good place to start.
The idea in itself is new and fresh and shows the roots of Chinese metal as much as where they’re going. For once, maybe other countries should look to China and replicate this idea, in order to create some sort of national metal momentum; it would most certainly benefit the visibility of underground Metal scenes around the globe.
The “Core In China” sampler is available for free on Soundcloud, Bandcamp as well as LastFM, plus you can download it from the Rock In China website which offers a lot more information on their projects as well.
