CHTHONIC: Japanese Version Of 'Mirror Of Retribution' Includes Bonus Tracks, Video

"Mirror of Retribution", the new album from Taiwanese metallers CHTHONIC, has just been released in Japan via Howling Bull Records. The Japanese version of the CD contains several bonus songs and a video.

The track listing is as follows:

01. Autoscopy (intro)
02. Blooming Blades
03. Hearts Condemned
04. Venom In My Veins
05. The Aroused
06. Sing-Ling Temple
07. 1947
08. Forty-Nine Theurgy Chains
09. Rise of the Shadows
10. Bloody Waves of Sorrow
11. Spell of Setting Sun: Mirror of Retribution
12. Blooming Blades (Taiwanese ver.)
13. Forty-Nine Theurgy Chains (Taiwanese ver.)
14. Bloody Waves of Sorrow (Taiwanese ver.)
15. Floated Unconsciously (Taiwanese ver.)
16. [enhanced] Forty-Nine Theurgy Chains

"Mirror of Retribution" sold around 270 copies in the United States in its first week of release, according to Nielsen SoundScan. The CD was issued in the U.S. on September 15 via Spinefarm Records.

CHTHONIC (pronounced "Thonic") is:

Freddy Lim - vocals
Doris Yeh - bass
Jesse Liu - guitar
Dani Wang - drums
CJ - piano/synthesizer

CHTHONIC's "49 Theurgy Chains" video can be viewed below.

In an interview with Speed Beaver Music, CHTHONIC vocalist Freddy Lim stated about the band's new album title and lyrical theme, "A mirror of retribution is the first thing you will meet when you are in hell, the Taiwanese, Oriental hell. Through the mirror, you see all the bad things you and your relatives have done in your lifetime. Each spirit has to face the mirror of retribution then the ghost king will send him to the specific level of hell that he deserves. In the Oriental hell, there are ten ghost kings in ten courts and there are 18 levels of hell and hundreds of small levels. So it takes millions of years for you to serve your sentence. So the original idea is to show this philosophy of hell. All the Asians, Hong Kong, Singapore, China, Vietnam, share the same philosophy.

"No other metal band has tried to do this. It's too big! So the question is how to do it. It not just like Satan and one burning hell. So in Taiwanese temples, there are some mediums there are people who can travel through heaven and hell and find people, find dead relatives and talk with them. So we needed a story, not just the facts. The story should be in Taiwanese history, so where is the crossover point between Taiwan and hell? So we found the point is the 228 incident which happened in 1947.

"It's not just because it's the biggest massacre that happened in Taiwan, but that the last battle happened in front of a very important Taiwanese temple. So it makes sense that someone in the temple who is a medium would try to save his people, save the Taiwanese from the tyrannical KMT army. So he travelled to hell to try to rewrite the book of life and death. So the original idea is to write about the philosophy of hell and then we found the right story to link Taiwan to hell. That's the basic idea of the story.

"The first half of the story is how he went to hell and how level by level he tried to find the book of life and death and tried to rewrite it. But then the ghost kings, wizards and monsters in hell found out that he is not a normal spirit, he's still alive, his spirit just left his body, so they, in the 6th song, all the spirits and ghost and monsters, they came from hell to the temple to try to put some seals on his body and suck his spirit back to his body and not allow him to escape from his body again. Then, he decided to kill himself as the only way to go back to hell. But he failed. The end of the story is that he is locked in front of the mirror of retribution for a billion years as his sentence. I think the most interesting part of this album is that we tried to group the same kinds of hells and put them together in one song. There are the mountain of knives and sword forests, different kind of sharp hells all grouped together."