Valley of the Damned by Dragonforce

Yeah, yeah, they’re a meme band, they suck live, all the songs sound the same, guitar hero haha hehe hoho. No. Shut up. I love this band. I saw them at the Brighton Music Hall in Boston, pressed up against three-hundred men larger and sweatier than me by an order of magnitude, and it was one of the best shows of my little life. It’s not about their wild technical ability and classical training. It’s not about the speed of their songs. (For the record, they didn’t miss a note all night.) And no, it’s not ironic at all. Dragonforce is a band about one thing above all else: joy.

I grew up in the middle of nowhere reading every single book I could find with a dragon on the cover. One of my earliest personal writing projects I can recall were stories that aped Kathryn Lasky’s Guardians of Ga’Hoole (the owl books, real ones know) with dragons. I was a dragon kid in the way my sister was a horse girl. Dragons, we’re all quick to point out, are not real. Yet my devotion to them knew no bounds, because dragons are unequivocally Cool. A medieval-adjacent flying dinosaur? That’s the Captain Planet of childhood obsessions. Dragons exist in our imaginations for the sole purpose of our entertainment. Happiness is a warm dragon.

Almost any Dragonforce song would do for this piece, I’ll admit. They know their tropes and talents and ply them without reservation on every number. I chose the title track of their debut album for several reasons. It hits all the familiar elements: seven minutes of blistering 200 bpm, operatic ambitions, and no fewer than three guitar solos. It’s also the first Dragonforce song anyone ever heard, and they were so immediately themselves, so distinct and precise, they basically haven’t changed in the 20 years.

One of the few bright spots left in this cold dead world, is watching guitarists Herman Li and Sam Totman write over Twitch. They pen parodies and originals with equal craftsmanship and humor. While trying to make a song in the style of Bowling For Soup, Totman remarks that “and she said” in a pop-punk song serves the same function as “and we will” in a power metal song. And look I’ve never written a song in my life, so maybe everyone else already knows, but this insight really galaxy brained me. Instantly I could name five songs that used those exact phrases. These guys know exactly what they’re doing when they write something as ridiculous as, “On a cold dark winter night, hidden by a stormy light, a battle rages for the right for what will become.” What does it mean? No one knows what it means, but it’s provocative. Gets the people going. The function of every Dragonforce song is analogous to the theme from Space Jam: hype you the fuck up.

The best demonstration of massive hype in “Valley of the Damned’ comes at the pre-chorus. The chord progression is the same as Shania Twain’s “That Don’t Impress Me Much” and countless other pop songs because it’s so goddam effective: E Minor, G, C, D. That pop perfection cranked up over an earthquake double-bass beat gets me bouncing in my seat every time. No disrespect to Miss Twain, but my standards are lower, and that do impress me much! Then, when all the instruments cut and Herman Li shreds a neon-bright riff, the tension builds even further, an audible “oh shit” moment before the face-melting truly begins. Li and Totman trade solos back and forth on this song and many others for the sheer joy of it. Guitar solos serve to express what words cannot, and these rhapsodize the simple sentiment: “I’m having so much fucking fun with my best friend right now.” How can anyone listen and not be totally charmed by the childlike glee with which these musicians make their magic happen? They are a little boy’s vision of rockstar guitarists. They are dragons come to life

I’m getting carried away.

The problem with music that goes zero to 100 is there’s nowhere left to go. It’s like a Transformers movie, everything is so intense we can’t retain any of it. Dragonforce is the band I listen to when I wish to achieve a state of “No Thoughts, Head Empty” enlightenment. The tension built up over the first five minutes of “Valley of the Damned” needs release, because all that intensity hasn’t actually been catharsis. So when outro comes, the drums and shredding let up, the relief is sensational. Their career could’ve started and ended with that song and they would still be just as dear to me. A complete arc, a whole oeuvre crammed into a seven-minute monstrosity.

Stuffed inside that tiny venue, belting out every absurd word to every banger, I smiled so hard my face hurt. The only people having a better time were the clowns on stage. Why be serious when you can be Dragonforce?