TINA GUO — Cello Metal (review)

Album · 2015 · Thrash Metal

4.5/5 · 2017-02-10
adg211288

Chinese cellist Tina Guo has had, so far, quite the genre spanning career. While much of her work falls within the classical music spectrum as you'd expect with a solo cellist, she's also played a range of other genres and covered songs from a wide range of sources. On her seventh album, Cello Metal (2015), Tina has produced her first metal album. It's not her first foray into the genre as both the earlier albums The Journey (2011) and Eternity (2013) both featured influences from metal, but this is her first (and so far only) fully-fledged metal release. Within it's forty-five minute duration she performs a mix of original material and covers from a selection of classic metal bands: Iron Maiden, Black Sabbath, Metallica, Pantera and Slayer.

With the name Cello Metal adorning the album it would be easy to liken what Tina Guo is doing here to the work of Apocalyptica but that would be an incorrect assumption. This isn't cello's amped up to imitate guitars, but a traditional metal setup of guitars, bass and drums but with lead cello, often replacing the role of the vocal melodies in the cover songs. What few vocals can be heard here are basically for sound effects – this is best considered to be an instrumental album.

As for the actual genre of the album, it's a mix of mostly heavy metal and thrash metal based riffs with one notable diversion into groove metal when Tina covers Pantera's Cowboys From Hell. Her cello sometimes makes things symphonic but classing this album in that niche wouldn't be accurate. Thanks in no small part to her two original songs The God Particle and Eternal Night as well as covers of Slayer's Raining Blood and Metallica's Welcome Home (Sanitarium), here just called Sanitarium, I can't help but consider Cello Metal to be primarily a thrash metal album. Tina's use of the Chinese Erhu in a track like her original piece Forbidden City also adds a touch of oriental folk to the album.

The clash of intense metal and cello is something that works really well for Tina Guo. She's a seriously talented cellist even without the metal behind her, as her work on other releases shows, but put that together with the metal and she seems to go on a whole other level. The final track, Queen Bee, which I believe is considered her signature piece, is absolutely insane. She really hammers that cello at a speed that makes it sound as if she's playing a thrash/speed metal riff and it even sounds as if the guitars in that song are having a hard time keeping up with her. Overall she's made a pretty unique sounding metal album where her own material is excellent and she makes the covers her own. Her take on Metallica's Sanitarium in particular is stunning. You'd think that the song always used a cello due to how smooth it sounds in the calmer sections.

Tina Guo's other work isn't much like this one (but still very nice stuff), though a few of her own tracks here were actually on prior releases as well. While I'd really like to hear her release another album in this style (no matter if it contains original material or covers of classics or both), she's certainly made a special album in Cello Metal. I haven't heard any metal band come out with something that sounds quite like this (though I haven't actually heard a whole Apocalyptica album to be fair, but the songs I have heard were much more symphonic than this album). Highly recommended stuff.

more than 2 years ago
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adg211288 wrote:

more than 2 years ago

Her latest album Game On! which was released just yesterday is pretty good too - it's all covers of video game music, and quite a few tracks have a rock or metal element to them.