DragonForce

Whenever faced with a crate of imported symphonic metal, our first thought is always, Who listens to this stuff? Can there be that many emigrated Germans, Brits and Italians banging their heads to the melodic, florid excess? What’s the point of metal if it’s lovely and harmonic? But then there’s DragonForce to answer our questions.

For the last decade, this U.K. (via Hong Kong, South Africa, Ukraine and France) combo has crafted dazzling “extreme power metal.” DragonForce celebrates the genre’s use of fantasy narrative, keyboards and melodic hooks, augmenting it by playing at inhuman, space-time-continuum–defying speed. In his upcoming book The 100 Greatest Metal Guitarists (Jawbone Press), rock scribe Joel McIver ranks shredder Herman Li at No. 20. The author summarizes Li’s ax work on “Heroes of Our Time,” from 2008’s Ultra Beatdown (Roadrunner), as “frankly, ludicrous.”

In its videos, the band includes picture-in-picture close-ups of Li’s hands just to prove he’s playing without studio trickery. DragonForce is a blast to watch, as the elegant, nimble Li trades solos with coguitarist Sam Totman (McIver’s No. 75), who comes off as a rough-edged pub rocker who just happens to have the ability to play a bizarrely complex, multifaceted guitar solo in several seconds.

Legend has it that Li and Totman originally failed as a black-metal band because they were just too happy to make gloomy murder music. If there’s any justification for the existence of a metallic subgenre with catchy choruses, sugary, Journey-like melodies and unmanly keyboard runs, it’s that it elevated two finger-tapping geeks to the pinnacle of the modern rock mountain: Their song is the most difficult to master in Guitar Hero III.