That’s ‘To’ as in ‘toe’ by the way, not as in ‘too’. In other words, “To Mega Therion”– The Great Beast himself, Aleister Crowley. Not that the Sussex-based warlord was actually all that great: sure, certain latter-day revelations about his alleged sexual proclivities would definitely place him in the ‘beastly’ camp, but in truth, the once self-proclaimed ‘Wickedest Man In The World’ was little more than a bloated drug addict who, by the time of his death in 1947, was reduced to living entirely on hard-boiled eggs lest he shit himself in public. We’ve all been there after a heavy festival…
The music of Swiss Thrashers Celtic Frost, on the other hand, simply dripped with evil and foreboding throughout: from the opening death-march chords of Innocence And Wrath until the final droning death throes of Necromantical Screams, this album (the band’s second) is sheer musical sadism on toast, yet never once does it abandon its mood of creeping, doom-laden portent in favour of sheer cheese or unnecessary bludgeon.
Every move, melody (yes, there are some) riff or pummel is executed with atmospheric precision: the equipment, amplification and playing may be primitive at best, but if anything, it’s this raw, unspoilt, dirgey brutality, topped beautifully with timpani, horns and other unusual sound treatments, that ensured there would never be another band quite like Celtic Frost. And, to date, there still hasn’t been: in terms of sheer nihilism, Texan metalcore-sludgers Today Is The Day and French industrialists Treponem Pal are probably the closest, but nobody else, not even their countrymen Coroner, ever quite plunged the slimy sonic bowels of the earth quite the way the Frost do here on Circle Of The Tyrants and Dawn Of Meggido.
Frontman/guitarist Tom G Warrior – known whilst a member of Hellhammer, whose Satanic Rites demo is equally worthy of investigation, as ‘Satanic Slaughter’ – has always been one of metal’s more literate, thoughtful recruits: until the artist’s death, he kept secondary employment as personal assistant and archivist to HR Giger and, rather than throwing on his occult robes for mere effect, always took a fully literate and historical interest in the subject that frankly made most of his contemporaries seem like amateurs. Unfortunately, he didn’t always make the best creative decisions: following the almost-but-not-quite-as-excellent Into The Pandemonium album, he infamously fucked his band’s burgeoning career single-handed by forsaking his black/thrash/doom roots for a glam/AOR sound on 1989’s Cold Lake, and suddenly, Celtic Frost were no longer legends but a laughing stock. Long-time fans were certainly not impressed by songs like Dance Sleazy and Seduce Me Tonight: the Crue/Poison/Jovi brigade at which it had so obviously been aimed didn’t bite either, and despite a sturdy, almost proggy follow-up in 1990’s Vanity/Nemesis, it was all over by the time the Nineties rolled in.
Of course, like all True Metal legends, they reformed in the mid-00s, largely at the behest of an enthusiastic fanbase who’d not been old enough to catch them the first time around: the resulting album, Monotheist, was a storming return to the brutal sound of old, but pretty soon, the egos got in the way and they split again in 2010 before a follow-up could be recorded. Perhaps tragically, the death of bassist Martin Eric Ain in 2017 seems to have drawn a line in the sand under their career for good- but for a while, the Frost were one of the most creepingly, lumberingly combos around, and if any band (other than Coven or early Current 93) came close to invoking the presence of ol’ Nick himself, it was them.
DARIUS DREWE
Like what we do? Support us and help us do more!
