"WELCOME TO THE DEAD WORLD"
by Pamela Torres
"Listen to them…the children of the night! What music they make!" – Bela Lugosi
Assembled and shocked to life like Frankenstein's monster on the summer of 2008, SaTaN is a toil-and-trouble trio of vampire misfits from Tokyo, Japan. Mastiff growler Hi-Na is in charge of molesting the solo guitar and inscribing lyrics in virgin blood. Shiya morbidly embraces his coffin bass and the putrid percussion is done entirely by killer clown D.K. As you boils and ghouls out there put on your candy-striped stockings and insert razor blades into sweet caramel apples, SaTaN has arrived just in time to provide the perfect Halloween soundtrack. As indicated in the dreary depths of its first release, a 5-song EP titled "Welcome to the Dead World," the band packs all the punches by blending meat cleaver metal anthems of sacrificial murder and walking cadavers with a high-camp spectacle of horror movie theatrics associated with the likes of King Diamond and Lordi. If you take a quick peak at SaTaN's official website, you'll discover that its menus are delightfully decorated with the same pouted lips and dripping font used in "The Rocky Horror Picture Show!" That's how tongue-and-cheek SaTaN is! Shrieked and sung by Hi-Na in phonetic English, "Welcome to the Dead World" cracks a crooked jack-o-lantern's smile beneath a grim reaper's hood.
The CD opens with a chopping block carol of holiday fear: "Jinglebells from Hell" is a beastly bite of corpse-grinding thrash metal that spills buckets of bubbling blood onto the twinkling colored lights of your neighbor's Christmas evergreen. Both the single "Death Song (from the Styx)" and "SOS" are hell pit crucifixion tracks that viciously incorporate elements of pitchfork punk and played at breakneck speed. The morbid but melodic love song "Bloody Bride – Night of the Living Dead" is a surprising catchy tune that offers in high decibels a scarlet bouquet of roses crawling with tarantulas while feeding rotten frosted cake to diseased rodents. Last but certainly not least, "Hell is Heaven" is 4 minutes and 40 seconds worth of 3-chord fisticuff punk rock guaranteed to excite the rebel in all of us.
It's absolutely astounding how even in a country like Japan, there is at least a couple of wildly dressed visual kei acts who are not at all ashamed to express their love of scary films to audiences. It just goes to show that you don't necessary have to live in Europe or the United States to celebrate the ghoulish art of disguising in a garish costume and tossing toilet paper onto an unsuspecting stranger's lawn. Oh, I almost forgot: I need to announce that very soon, SaTaN will yank from the rabbit hole a brand new audio fright fest titled "Alice in Dead World." Better keep your half-eaten eyeballs out for that! In the meantime, whatever you do, don't look in the closet!