Dragonforce
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Get them while they're young and steal their minds? Well, maybe, as Li points out that it Dragonforce's sound is a very engaging form of music. “It stimulates the brain, it’s more complicated. So when they do their exams . . .” He laughs.
“We always do the set list depending on the audience we’re playing to,” he continues regarding why he believes his band's status has gone through the roof in the past few months. “We don’t play the same thing. We don’t know what we’re going to say onstage, what chaos is going to happen. It’s much more natural for the audience too. ‘I went to see Dragonforce last week, and the singer said exactly the same words, exactly the same sentences.’ These used to work in the '80s when there was no Internet communication, where everyone could do the same show all the time . . . Now they know what set list you play, what you say onstage, they capture it on video. Every tour we do we have a different keyboard and guitar solo. Random solo sections. Another band, they might play the same drum solo for every tour. We always want to change to a different song. We’re writing a different song each time for the soloists. It’s more surprises. We always have to push it.”
This not only makes Dragonforce very much a band of the times, it also puts a welcome pressure on it to constantly keep advancing and adapting. Like its music, it’s a fast and furious ride that doesn’t slow down.
“The great thing is the stage setup was all thought up by the band. We didn’t hire this crew who said, 'This is how you should set up your drums,' " Li says. "The riser in the middle came from the W.A.S.P. tour, when we were supporting W.A.S.P. They had this big microphone stand and a big box to hold it. Every night the box had to stay there because they take out this microphone thing—it’s like a skeleton—but they needed the box there for the microphone stand to sit in. So every night when we did the support we had this box, so we thought, 'Why not use it?' We started jumping off it. It’s kind of our own thing. It’s extended to a back box, left, right box, trampoline. Sam just went [and] bought a trampoline one day and started putting it on the set.”
Which brings us back to where the unexpected is the norm and accidents are just around the corner waiting to pounce. We can only hope that no one flies over the lip of the stage while running from the ramps, off the box and onto the trampoline. (Actually, that might make for good watching.) One thing is for certain—in this age of faceless copycat bands, Dragonforce stands out for all the right reasons. It might not be the heaviest thing to happen to metal in years (that honor belongs to Mastodon), but it sure is the most exciting. [END]
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