A Review from Aristocrazia Webzine

Before getting started, I reckon an introductory statement is due: I admit I am not a big folk metal fan. Apart from Finntroll and a few others, this scene is really far from me and more often than not it sounds uninteresting to my ears.

This being said, over the last year I got to know a band that shook my perception of folk metal: Nine Treasures. Those of you who have been following us for the last year already know I saw them live at the Beijing Midi Festival in May and at the Shanghai one in October, so that I had chance to witness their rise to success. This band from Inner Mongolia (a huge province in Northern China bordering Mongolia) rapidly became the highlight of an quickly-growing scene. Mongolian-influenced music has now become a big phenomenon in the underground (and not only) in China starting from Hanggai, one of the first bands from there to attain some kind of international recognition in the last decade or so.

However, Nine Treasures (九宝 in Chinese) repr