I think Monotheist might be the heaviest album ever recorded. I don't mean the loudest, fastest or hardest. There are darker and more br00tal bands.
But this record melts every speaker system I have, down to my $40 ipod dock. If you can make my iPod dock sound this heavy, you have done your job right.
Anyone know any stories of how this album was recorded? I want to learn from these people. I also think the drums are real (not replaced).
True to Iron Maiden's promise at Madison Square Garden in 2000, the decade that followed has seen a resurgence of metal that not only obliterated the specter of death staking the genre in the 1990s, but makes previous heydays seem puny in comparison. Metal in the 2000s was all about proliferation: new styles emerged, old ones regenerated, and - thanks to the Internet - exposure spread like a virus. To highlight all of that success , we're launching Again We Rise, an occasional feature that will celebrate the releases that rose above the voluminous crowd to become classics. Today, Celtic Frost's Monotheist.
In the measurement of an album's brutality, there are a few key ways for a release to stand out: it can hit you physically, executing a convergence of riffs and mix that feel like a beating; mentally, dazzling you with vision-generating atmospherics; or psychologically, daring you to confront the true meaning of emptiness. Metal being such a masochistic art form, all three methods are enjoyable, but it's the psychologically brutal albums that are perhaps the most effective - and of the past decade's releases, none were more effective than Monotheist. Fourteen years in the waiting and six in the making, the swansong album for Celtic Frost takes its surface character from the bone-dry distortion of a single shambling guitar and the tuneless chant of Tom Warrior, working in tandem to drive the listener slowly down the road to the abyss.
There are many strange and wonderful sights along the way, however that keep Monotheist from becoming a simple plodder: the opening of "A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh," where a few simple guitar counterpoints, the rumble of a bass, and a haunting melody sung by Martin Ain build to a crushing crescendo that they eliminate the potential cliché in the lyrics - "frozen is heaven/frozen is hell/and I am dying in this living human shell" - with mesmerizing ability.
The combination of feedback, analog keyboard pads, and a To Mega Therion-style female vocal in duet with Warrior's growl on "Drown in Ashes" becomes the aural equivalent of chasing will 'o the wisps through a swamp.
The sonic imagery of "Totengott," which might as well be the bedrock for the albums released by Teitanblood, Anaal Nathrakh, and 1349 last year.
"Winter," which sums up all of the emptiness Monotheist trumpets in spades with a simple 1:30 of droning, shifting strings.
If the contemplation of nothing and our insignificance in the face of that infinity that represents this contemplation at its truest had a soundtrack, it would be Monotheist.
I am fortunate enough to have a job where I can throw on a pair of headphones and listen while I work, so the majority of my music listening - and concequently, my music evaluating - takes place during the working hours. While this arrangement generally works to my advantage, there are a few things I just can't listen to, because I'm not in the right mindset. Monotheist, for example, is a great album that I can't listen to at work because I start comparing my cube to a dark pit of despair where I labor ceaselessly on a treadmill for a pitiful reward and the knowledge that my death is a few hours closer. The result is a testament to Celtic Frost's abilities, no doubt, but not a great way to go through the work day.
Having just put Revelations of the Black Flame through a second listen, I have come to the conclusion that 1349's follow up to Hellfire deserves to be put on the same pedestal of respect: I just can't get into the album's murky soundscapes when I'm writing emails and updating spreadsheets. Instead, it seems that I'd be best served by saving Revelations... for a trek through a swamp - or a walk in the next heavy NYC rainstorm - letting the evil seep into me in a habitat closer to its creators' mindsets.
Gotta love the guy from Neversoft boasting about how Metal he is on the Playstation Blog.
But I have seen the track listing for the game, and yes there is more Pete Seeger and Lynyrd Skynyrd than Mercyful Fate.
So don't show me your fucking Celtic Frost, Kreator and Voivod vinyl album covers if you aren't planning on putting them in the game. It just makes you look like a douche nozzle.
Saturday night was my first conscious experience of the phenomenon of indie metal and - to my memory - my first experience with the unexpected comforts of the Bowery Ballroom, a venue whose Lower East Side location and suggestion of significant age (I don't think they build ballrooms anymore) had always conjured images of a far scuzzier building to my mind. Maybe they cleaned the place up recently, but I didn't fear the acquisition of infectious diseases on contact with the air and the acoustics were really quite impressive.
I mentioned indie metal above; I think the most interesting part of the whole night was the idea of a bunch of fairly unevil (if slightly crazed) looking dudes playing loud music that only people who weren't metalheads would identify as metal. That's no knock against Baroness or opening act Coliseum, but merely an observation of the oddity of seeing one's subgenre coopted in ways that - for all of metal's versatility - only barely fit within the confines of the genre. Did I bang my head, pump my fist, and jump around a bit? Sure. Could these guys acquire the label of post-punk just as easily as that of metal? Definitely. There was some riffage and technical skill on display, but it - and most of the people watching it - were light years away from the old school uglies I saw this summer in New Jersey or the kids beating the crap out of each other a month ago at the Hammerstein.
Perhaps the biggest evidence of a stranger in a strange land mentality was the clothing of choice. I was with two of my bandmates (both big Baroness fans who'd convinced me, a virgin to their sound, to go); we were wearing t-shirts from Opeth, Darkthrone, and Celtic Frost. We spent most of the night playing a mental game of counting the shirts of bands like Mastodon and High on Fire all around us. At one point, Seth came back from the bar and said he'd seen some evidence of true metal: a kid wearing a Children of Bodom shirt. Later on, I wondered about the possible results of an ethnomusicological study of the indie metal community.
Back in 2002/2003, I was a senior in college. I was a music major - no surprise there - and because my aptitude was in analysis (and because I thought I was going to go to study ethnomusicology) I decided to spend the year writing a lengthy senior thesis in music. On Dream Theater, Metropolis Pt. 2: Scenes From a Memory, and the history of progressive metal. Like I said, huge metal nerd. Or maybe just nerd in general.
I wrote the history part first, as part of another paper I had to write for a colloquium class I took in the fall (doubling up was the way they kept thesis writers from going insane and strangely enough, it worked). As it turns out, there are no good histories of progressive metal out there. In fact, from what I remember, my options came down to the short blurb in the All Music Guide, whatever was up on anus.com, and the BNR metal pages, none of which actually answered the fundamental question: what exactly prompted all of these bands to mix progressive elements into their music? Lacking access to any of the artists in question, I did the next best thing: took a history of progressive rock, a history of metal, and came to my own conclusions. The result was, well, it's probably wildly inaccurate, but I look pretty smart doing it, and I get to say I wrote a 120+ page page while in college. The ladies were impressed, believe you me.
Reading all of that history should give you an understanding of why I'm excited to read this book once it comes out next year: if Jeff Wagner really did his homework, he might just come up with a common root for all of the experimentation done by bands as diverse as Dream Theater, Celtic Frost, and Voivod and answer the question I failed to answer five years ago. And you know what? I'd really appreciate that.
Posts
