That's Inhuman, That's Dragonforce!

England's Dragonforce are a self proclaimed "Extreme Power Metal" band, and they have a good reason for calling themselves that. The band has been dazzling viewers at their live shows with their over-the-top virtuosic playing and stage acrobatics. Herman Lee is one of the band's two fantastic guitarists, and he has won several prizes as last year's best metal guitar player, I caught up with him in a German hotel, preparing to do the last German shows of their current tour.

Hey Herman, I understand you're wrapping up the last gigs with Edguy.

Yea, Tomorrow is our last show supporting Edguy, we also did shows in the UK, Sweden and several other European countries, about a week from now we're embarking on our head-lining tour, we'll also go the US later this year.

How is the material from the new album being received?

Its catching on great, we do about 4 songs from each album and it turns out fine, it will be quite different with our headlining shows, we only did a 40 minute set during this tour but we'll do a much longer one on our own.

It’s the same set at every show?

No, we're trying to diversify, it depends on the country we're in and our set of mind that night, every few sets we try and change things a bit.

Do you do cover songs on the live shows?

No, just original materiel, with three albums we've got plenty of that! We once did a cover of Iron Maiden's The Evil That Men Do, but that's it.

What does the name of the new album mean?

Its something which describes the music, Inhuman Rampage is our style of metal, the most extreme side of melodic metal; it's our amount of lead guitar work, the brutal drumming.

What makes this album different than the last two?

Its more of everything, its faster, more melodic, more energetic, we've taken melodic metal into its farthest regions, I can honestly say that no one ever heard this kind of music before.

Would you describe it as power metal?

It’s a bit hard for me to put such a label on us, we're much more extreme and fast than any power metal band that I know of, its closer to thrash and even black metal, the only thing that connects us to power metal is the hard rock vocals, but beyond that, its not power metal as you know it.

I understand you also took part in producing the album.

Yea, it's me, Sam – the other guitarist, and Vadim, our keyboardist, we did it all ourselves. That's the best way for us to sound as good as we want ourselves to sound, I don’t think there's any need of a name producer when we can do things best ourselves.

How do you and Sam divide the guitar parts between yourselves?

There's no clear cut separation, each one of can write a riff or a lead and the other guy can do it, we don’t have a separate style of playing any more, when we started out Sam still didn’t do everything I did, but he progressed amazingly during the last few years and I cant really say we do different things any more.

Is it true that you never formally studied how to play the guitar?

Yea, I taught myself from videos and books, I sat down with a guitar and listened to all my guitar idols, people like Steve Vai, Tony Macapline, Vinnie Moore,

But you're playing is faster then theirs.

I developed my own style, I just played them faster than they did, and progressed through that.

You use a video game motif in your album, how did that come up?

Both me and Sam are video game fanatics, so we use a lot of samples and sounds in our guitar playing that resemble video game sounds, its just a mad idea that we had, not for any specific logical reason, but its all part of our musical madness, the same with the drum blast beats.

What about your stage antics, do you always jump off trampolines these days?

Yea, it started out unplanned, we just loved to jump a lot onstage, but it developed into a regular thing we do, we have tons of energy during our shows so we started planning and practicing our jumps and aerobics, we started to synchronies the onstage madness.

You're one of a very short list of British power metal bands, how well are you received in the UK?

Its our best place to do gigs in actually! We've become one of the country's biggest metal bands and we get great press most of the time, even people that listen to such bands as Slipknot like our music, I guess because we're the most extreme version of the melodic metal genre.

Are you referred to as a power metal band over there?

Not exactly, we don’t sing about dragons and such so we don’t really get labeled as such, our texts are mostly closer to thrash and more extreme kinds of metal.

You recently did a video for the first track in the album, Through The Fire And Flames, which is even getting some MTV2 rotation.

Yea, it was great fun, not so difficult to do, we were surprised by how well it did, even in shows that don’t usually play metal videos. In Some countries it even got into the charts and reached high places in them, I guess that's because it has all the elements that the album has: Speed, melody, aggression.

So where do you see the band going in the next few months?

Touring as much as we can, and giving our best at every single show, you need to see us live to understand just how much of an experience it is, and I suggest everyone should listen to the new album, its like nothing you've heard before!