Danse Macabre

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On paper, the story of CELTIC FROST‘s early years is as unlikely as it is extraordinary: a tale of how teenagers from rural Switzerland, at once audaciously ambitious and ferociously uncompromising, took heavy metal into new, exciting and unquestionably extreme territory. That they did so in the face of adversity at almost every turn makes this story even more incredible.

It almost seems churlish to regard Celtic Frost as one of the great extreme metal bands, because they were so much more than that. It’s better to hail them as among the finest extreme and experimental bands of the 1980s. Refusing ever to do what was expected or demanded, the band constantly changed musical direction, always brought in surprising influences, and kept people guessing as to where they might venture next. Their catalogue of albums is formidable and unmatched. Each is not only unique, but part of an entire tapestry that only now can be appreciated for being a remarkable part of music history. Despite, or maybe because of, constant turmoil on so many fronts, Celtic Frost achieved an artistic level few others would even have dared to dream of aspiring towards. They climbed high because they were never afraid to fall. Which is why the band are now rightly regarded as icons, and iconoclasts. That band was Celtic Frost. Everything about this new outfit was to be different. Warrior and Ain wanted it to have the power and excitement of the thrash metal bands emerging in the US, but the ultimate intent was to not be constrained by metal’s self-imposed rules – an attitude shaped by the band’s geographical isolation from the mainstream metal scene. “It was a constant conflict, because we loved metal. At the same time, however, we were conflicted by feeling that metal is so limited, that there were albums with notes saying: ‘No keyboards on this album’, and so on, like it was something evil,” he recalls. “We felt, where are these unwritten laws that say you cannot combine a keyboard with metal, or you cannot combine classical music with metal? We didn’t want to accept this. We were anarchists.” What made this album, and at the time Celtic Frost too, was Warrior’s ability to think outside the box, making many of their contemporaries look one dimensional. The better reception to the album was vindicating. Journalists – and here Tom gratefully notes Kerrang! writers Malcolm Dome, Xavier Russell, Paul Elliott and Dante Bonutto – began to understand that they wanted to be a different kind of metal band. Not only that, for the first time the band began playing live, making their London debut at the Hammersmith Palais. The remarkable music Celtic Frost made between 1984 and 1987 is now gathered together in a massive box set – heavy both literally and musically – called Danse Macabre. Even now, it sounds more current than almost all other metal from that era. It displays the first crystallisation of extreme metal, where the sense of formal experimentation is every bit as important as grinding riffs. It still sounds brutally, thrillingly alive.Returning to the studio to make Into The Pandemonium, any set of rules were firmly out the window. Describing the mood as “irrationally confident”, Tom also says that the surge of music from all over at the time, inside and out of metal, meant that it was easy to become inspired with every new thing he heard. It all went in, whether it came out metal or not. Where the influence of bands like Joy Division and Siouxsie And The Banshees added to the band’s musical palette, visually To Mega Therion found Celtic Frost working with another Swiss outsider: genius artist H.R. Giger. Though by now the owner of an Oscar for his work on Alien, for much of his career Giger had been subject to similar criticisms as Hellhammer and Frost. His paintings were too dark, the art world had said, too weird, too unconventional. His ideas were dangerous, offensive, blasphemous.

On paper, the story of Celtic Frost’s early years is as unlikely as it is extraordinary: a tale of how teenagers from rural Switzerland, at once audaciously ambitious and ferociously uncompromising, took heavy metal into new, exciting and unquestionably extreme territory. That they did so in the face of adversity at almost every turn makes this story even more incredible. Just as then, today as a 59-year-old man and reluctant metal legend, Tom believes that music should be something without walls, without limits, a deep expression of its creator. With current band Triptykon, its’s a route he continues to take, brilliantly searching the shadows for ever-darker shades of music. To Mega Therion’ was Celtic Frost’s next album, recorded in September ‘85. Due to personal difficulties, Martin was not in the band at that point, and so bass duties for the recording were carried out by session player Dominic Steiner. Martin’s absence also meant that Tom was responsible for the music and virtually all of the lyrics. But despite difficult circumstances, the resulting album, however, was a triumph. Replete with iconic cover art by HR Giger, ‘To Mega Therion’ imposes its dark majesty from the off with the orchestral bombast of ‘Innocence And Wrath’, before launching into the savagery of the hook-laden ‘The Usurper’. Daring, dark and superlatively heavy, ‘To Mega Therion’ is a sophisticated expression of Celtic Frost’s inherent drive to eschew genre limitations and, instead, define art on their own terms. One of the first bands to follow in the rupturing aftermath of Venom’s first single and two albums, was Swiss metal group Celtic Frost. One of the reasons Celtic Frost came out of the traps so hard in 1984 was that Thomas Fischer and Martin Ain had already been part of a band where intent and passion far outstripped ability in the form of Hellhammer, a group hated so much by the international metal press that the aspirations of its main members were nearly crushed into inertia. Whether this was the fuel that propelled Celtic Frost or not (other potential power sources include an obvious emerging zeitgeist, geographical isolation from nearly all other metal groups and Fischer’s weird and unpleasant childhood), in three short years they would come to represent the best of the spirit of innovation in heavy metal during the mid-80s. Or they did to anyone paying attention at least. Over the course of little more than three years between 1984 and 1987, CELTIC FROST established themselves as one of the most important bands in extreme and experimental music of that era. Due on October 28 in Europe and November 25 in the U.S., “Danse Macabre” brings together the band’s recordings from those years, capturing their boundary-pushing ambition and creative zeal.

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Now Celtic Frost are a band I am aware of but not familiar with. The closest I’ve come to them is seeing Triptykon live a few years ago, which is essentially seeing one member playing in a different band. They were still an active entity when I was in my formative metal years, but just one of the many bands I didn’t pursue. As such, this review is essentially my very first exposure to their music (aside from unwittingly hearing “Circle of the Tyrants” on Obituary’s Cause of Death and not knowing it was a cover). Not bad given that most of the material was released 35+ years ago. Morbid Tales (1984)