Welcome to the second article of my Asian Metal Bands-series. In this part I will cover the metal scene of (South) Korea and it was really a hard task to break all those great bands down to a few.

Oathean

Oathean is a korean melodic black metal band that has been formed 1993 originally under the name Odin, but changed their name three years later after a short hiatus.

Neither their lyrical themes are subject to satanism or anti-christianity nor they are using corpsepaint which is actually typical for black metal bands. Their lyrics mainly deal with depression and sadness and they incorporate influences of folk metal as well as korean world music with the use of traditional korean instruments.

Since their name change, Oathean has released five albums: “The Eyes of Tremendous Sorrow” (1998), “Ten Days in Lachrymation” (2001), “The Last Desperate 10 Years as Ever” (2003, containing the 1997 demo and remastered old songs), “Fading Away into the Grave of Nothingness” (2004), “The Eyes of Tremendous Sorrow + As a Solitary Tree Against the Sky” (2005, containing five new songs and the first album) and “Regarding All the Sadness of the World” (2008).

Cruel Sadness from Regarding All the Sadness of the World:

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I’m convinced that nearly each blogger knows that problem: you want to write an article about something that you discovered or expierenced and while doing some research or working on the article you get lost in the world wide web and/or the topic itself.

In fact I wanted to write this article a couple of weeks ago as I found a taiwanese black metal. The band is called ChthoniC and I found it by chance. While checking out some online resources, amongst others last.fm.

While browsing through the similiar artists of ChthoniC I had the chance to discover a few more asian black/death metal bands that I would like to share with you. In the end I decided to write a whole article series of at least five parts.

Each part will cover bands from a specific country, namely Taiwan¹, China, Japan and Korea. The articles will mainly focus on black and death metal bands and will also feature some gothic or doom metal bands as well as metalcore.

Here is the planned article list:

1. Part 1: Taiwan
2. Part 2: Korea
3. Part 3: China
4. Part 4: Japan
5. Part 5: Others

So stay tuned and come back for the first article which will be posted soon.