What a record. I know Celtic Frost‘s legacy was already long since set by the time they returned to do Monotheist in 2006, and that their earlier works in 1984’s Morbid Tales EP, 1985’s debut album, To Mega Therion, and 1987’s Into the Pandemonium — not to mention what Thomas Gabriel Fischer and Martin Eric Ain had done previously in Hellhammer — had already cast them as one of the formative units not just of black metal, but of a new kind of heavy darkness in general. But 15 years later and long since the band fell apart all over again, Monotheist still resonates, and it’s still so goddamned dense. Thick to the point of making it difficult to move through. Righteous in the challenge it issued to its audience. Righteous in its unmitigated grandiosity. Righteous in its crush, righteous in its indulgent use of space and ambience. Righteous in its heft and heavy in its righteousness.

Fischer had gotten divorced in 2004, and that may well have played into some of the spit in his vocal approach on songs like “Progeny” or “Domain of Decay,” though as I recall many of these songs were older at least in their foundation. The CD came with extensive liner notes — a band putting out their first LP in 16 wanting to be understood are well within their rights to do so — with Ain and Fischer, sometimes opaque, sometimes straightforward, talking about the whens and wheres. If you got the digipak, it came with the extra track “Temple of Depression,” which is a welcome speedier thrust between “Os Abysmi vel Daath” and “Obscured,” but listening back to Monotheist now, I wonder if the album isn’t best served as a double-vinyl. Certainly CDs were already in decline in 2006 and now-clunky-looking iPods were high fashion, but vinyl had yet to make its mass-market comeback as the dominant physical format, but Monotheist works exceedingly well with breaks.

Part of that is the aforementioned density. Celtic Frost‘s sound is about more than just the chug of their riffs, and they never hit harder or certainly with more elaborate produciton behind them than they did on Monotheist, making their atmospheres all the more consuming. The 2LP edition traded out “Temple of Depression” for the more atmospheric “Incantation Against You,” with guest lead vocals by Simone Vollenweider — a performance worthy of the investment that was also a bonus track on the Japanese edition CD; you could go nuts keeping it all straight — but the way that the songs split up into sides highlights the natural flow from one movement into the next, the album working in stages until finding its culmination in “Triptych I: Totengott,” the 14-minute “Triptych II: Synagoga Satanae” and “Triptych III: Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale),” the last a four-minute orchestral instrumental answer back to previous Celtic Frost works that would be a fitting culmination to Celtic Frost‘s career even if they didn’t know it at the time.

The initial salvo of “Progeny,” “Ground” and “Dying God Coming into Human Flesh” is unfuckwithable. The immediacy of the first, the still-catchy crush of the second and the ambience of the third — it sets the stage perfectly for everything Celtic Frost and their vast array of guests, engineers, session players, etc. will offer throughout, the actual band involved being Fischer, Ain, drummer Franco Sesa and guitarist Erol Unala. Ain and Fischer sharing vocal duties on “A Dying God Coming into Human Flesh” particularly, in how it pushes wider the context of the listening experience, is a thing to be treasured in the message it sends to the audience. As heavy and as bludgeoning as Monotheist is, it stretches no less wide as it goes deeper.

And deeper is exactly where the LP version heads on side B, with “Drown in Ashes” bringing in guest singer Lisa Middelhauve (Xandria) in a grim duet with Fischer ahead of the return to harsh doom chug in “Os Abysmi vel Daath” — a landmark hook in any language — and the spacious, patient “Obscured,” again with Vollenweider turning in an emotive performance alongside Fischer, the two touching on harmony even as the distortion builds behind them. “Incantation Against You,” though it starts the next platter, builds in turn on that, with “Domain of Decay” bringing a return of sheer aural force for a quick four and a half minutes before “Ain Elohim” offers as pure a take on Satanism as I’ve ever encountered: “There is no god but the one that dies with me,” along with a stretch of pure avant garde metal that’s outside genre even as the band helped define it.

While we’re pushing boundaries, “Totengott” feels prescient 15 years later with its Ain-led ambient black metal, while “Synagoga Satanae” brings the summary of the proceedings — including co-producer Peter Tägtgren (Hypocrisy, Pain, etc.) on backing vocals — as a whole and “Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale)” serves as epilogue, a final, ultra-purposeful three-part ending that especially isolated on side D of the 2LP version underscores the strength of intention behind everything happening on Monotheist.

This is the kind of record a band does once in a career. It is all-consuming, an utter creative blowout, and in hindsight, it’s not surprising they didn’t make another. It’s not so much that they couldn’t have topped it — I won’t say a negative word about what Fischer has gone on to do in Triptykon in carrying forward what Celtic Frost established here, up to and including the 2020 live record from Roadburn 2019 completing Celtic Frost‘s “Requiem” — but it seems ludicrous now to think they would’ve done anything else. How could they? What’s left after you’ve already dug to the marrow of yourself and presented it to your listener? Sometimes there’s just nothing more that needs to be said.

Beautiful, genuinely engrossing, punishing, Monotheist is a museum piece for what heavy metal can be. That’s not what everyone will want from a given listening experience, but the last statement Celtic Frost would make was that if you weren’t going to meet them at their level, then you were only going to be obliterated for standing in their way, even at the cost of obliterating themselves.

One of the best albums the aughts had to offer, and of course rest in peace Martin Eric Ain, who passed away in 2017.

As always, I hope you enjoy. Thanks for reading.

—

I’m having dental surgery on Monday. They’re putting a screw in the hole in my mouth here a molar was until I had it pulled, with an eventual eye toward a dental implant. I guess the screw will be an improvement over the presently empty spot, though that’s been an interesting experience. They had to take the tooth out in pieces it was so dug in, did a good amount of bone graft with some magical science pellets. I anticipate having a rod screwed into my jawline will present some discomfort. I don’t expect it to interrupt the flow of the Quarterly Review, and that and passive interest-in-what’s-gonna-happen is about the extent of my feelings on the matter, apart from the general nervousness about leaving the house, doing a thing, and so on.

Fucking Celtic Frost, man. How good is that record? I got to interview Martin Ain and Tom Fischer when they played New York on tour, in-person, and it was fucking awesome. They had rented an apartment downtown and then later that night they demolished B.B. King’s in Midtown Manhattan, and it was well worth breaking my blood oath never to go to Midtown. That room was pure love, despite the blanket of bleakness cast over the entire proceedings. So heavy. I just looked to see if there was any audio or video of it on YouTube, and there isn’t, but if you want to go down a rabbit hole, there’s plenty of older live stuff there.

This week brought the exhale that was being able to send The Pecan to daycamp for three hours every day. An easy pattern to fall into, thanks largely to the fact that he was in preschool before. We dropped him off a bit ago, in fact. He didn’t even look back at us as he went through the door, so I guess he likes it well enough. Very good.

That three-hour respite is huge, from 8:30-11:30. It allowed me to do the Quarterly Review this week while staying sane in the process, and since he still takes a rest in the afternoon — sometimes he naps, but mostly he just goes up to his room and farts around making various degrees of noise in unsupervised but contained fashion — I had some time to unwind, read a book, which is massive as far as my general quality of life goes.

I’m reading Star Trek books, as usual, a three-part series called ‘My Brother’s Keeper’ about Jim Kirk and Gary Mitchell, who dies in the (second) pilot of The Original Series, about how they’re best friends and Kirk has to deal with the fallout of having to kill Mitchell after he becomes a megalomaniac with godlike powers. You’d want to retcon it now making him a malevolent Q. And by you, I mean me, in fan-fic. As regards brain power, though, it’s this or that, and I’m better off here.

But that impulse is there for sure.

Come hang out in the Facebook group. It’s getting to be a whole thing.

New Gimme show today, as previously noted. You can listen free: https://gimmeradio.com. 5PM Eastern. Lotsa Neurosis, little bit of me talking about how good Neurosis are. Good fun.

That’s about all I’ve got. Thanks again to everybody who’s snagged some of the new merch. Thinking it might be time to end the run in another week or so, just because I’m starting to feel like a shill plugging it, but please know that your support is sincerely appreciated. Much love.

Great and safe weekend. Hydrate, watch your head, all that stuff. Have fun.

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Tags: Celtic Frost, Celtic Frost Monotheist, Century Media, Monotheist, Switzerland, Zürich

This entry was posted on Friday, July 9th, 2021 at 11:45 am and is filed under Bootleg Theater. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed.