There was, of course, no way the band could have foreseen the profound influence this album would have on the metal scene, introducing a heavy use of both orchestration and female vocals into the metal template at a time when both were largely unheard of. Nonetheless, the fact that the band were taking a considerable risk with the recording was impossible to ignore.
“I knew it was a very dangerous album. It was a time when female vocals and classical instruments were very foreign to heavy metal and no other extreme metal band of the time would have touched it. Metallica, Slayer, all that, they would never have touched it and we did, and I’m very proud of that. I think if you are a musician, an artist, you have to have a certain courage. Repeating yourself or photocopying other’s art… it’s cowardice. If you actually risk your career to do something new, even if it’s in a very small way, then it’s art. Especially heavy metal musicians who pose like they’re big, bad men in their leathers …a lot of those bands are so conservative and scared to ever deviate from their track. …to me heavy metal itself is a powerful, energetic, courageous music. It’s a revolutionary music, or at least it was when it arose in the seventies and I cannot believe so many people are scared to go anywhere with that. So this was the music we wanted to make, and surprisingly it turned out to be our breakthrough album.”
Unfortunately this achievement came with a heavy price. While the album was warmly received (although inevitably it would prove too challenging for some of the band’s more conservative listeners), and earned the band both new fans and critical acclaim, its creation would also directly help to destroy the band.
Celtic Frost’s most experimental work, Into the Pandemonium, 1987
“We completely overstretched ourselves,” Tom reflects. “We were still very limited as musicians, we hardly had a budget and we had a record label that fought every day against this album. They wanted us to do a sure-shot album, they told us literally, ‘Make an album like Slayer or Exodus.’ They didn’t want to have an experimental album and they tried everything; they threatened to put us on ice, to throw us out of the studio, they paid the engineer behind our backs to sabotage our album, every day was bad news. And in addition we could hardly make the album because we simply were not good enough musicians, so everyday was a gargantuan undertaking for us.
“The record company, when we persisted with this album, turned toward open confrontation. They cancelled our video, they cancelled the tour support that they were contractually obligated to provide and they changed the album round in an attempt to make it a more traditional heavy metal album, which resulted in an exchange of attorney for fourteen months and burdened us with a huge legal bill to regain our artistic freedom. These legal wranglings were one of the reasons the band split up. We were young at the time and didn’t have the legal backing, a proper management, the connections or the experience to withstand such an assault from a corporation, and even though we persisted with our principles and got rid of the contract and were free at the end, the free band was a band that no longer existed. It was our breakthrough album but the result was that Celtic Frost was over and done with … Into the Pandemonium is basically the epitaph of the original Celtic Frost.”
The band did indeed fall apart after the album, only to be resurrected six months later by Tom, together with a new lineup that included Steven Priestly, the session drummer from Morbid Tales who had previously turned down the offer to become a full-time member of the band. The resulting album, Cold Lake, is not only Celtic Frost’s worst album, but has established a reputation—perhaps slightly unrealistically—as the worst album in metal’s history. Indeed, even today the phrase “Cold Lake” is occasionally used by the metal press for “an irredeemable album by a once great band,” and although in retrospect its glam rock/melodic thrash crossover attempt doesn’t quite live up to its terrible reputation, it’s fair to say that it was deeply flawed and a great disappointment compared to what had come before.
“We were completely drained and the consensus was to record a much straighter, more melodic album, with much less experimentation with the lineup of Reed, Martin and myself,” Tom explains. “But because the band fell apart I was panicking. My castle, my sanctuary, my harbor had been music ever since I was a kid and I had not faced a single day without a band since Grave Hill. The prospect of there being no Celtic Frost drove me to do something I should have never done, which was to continue with a bunch of idiots. I had also freshly fallen in love with the woman who would later be my wife and the end of that litigation and this never-ending hell and me being in love just conspired in me wanting to be happy, and wanting to do something colorful, something positive. And that’s all nice and dandy, but that’s not Celtic Frost. I should have done a solo album or whatever, but it should never have been a Celtic Frost album. It also made me relinquish control, I was way too much involved in my new relationship and left the studio for great periods of time and let the people do whatever they wanted to do.
“Of course the whole thing turned out to be a piece of fucking circus play, an album which no one can take seriously including me, it was a hugest mistake of my entire life. There is no other misstep—and I’ve done a few in my life, believe me—but there is no other misstep that rates so drastically highly in my life as this album. The only redeeming feature is that I swore to myself to never be so careless again, to never relinquish control over an album so much, to never fail on such a gargantuan scale as an artist again…. I am not a coward and I don’t run away from this—if I take responsibility for the grandiosity of certain things of Hellhammer and Celtic Frost then I also have to be man enough to take responsibility for this epic failure.”
The follow-up, Vanity/Nemesis, released in 1990 and featuring the return of Martin Ain, was a far stronger effort musically speaking, closer to the melodic but heavy thrash metal album that the band had originally envisioned for Cold Lake. It was not enough to fully rejuvenate the band, however; a compilation featuring unreleased and rerecorded material, Parched With Thirst Am I and Dying, was issued in 1992 and the band split for the second time the following year.
Two of metal’s most influential bands, Hellhammer and Celtic Frost are rightly hailed as vital catalysts in the creation of various metal genres, including gothic metal, doom metal, orchestral metal, thrash metal, and also the death metal scene to whom they were closely linked at one time. Yet it is unquestionably the black metal scene that they have become primarily linked to as the years have passed.
“That’s probably because death metal has become very technical over the years,” Tom ponders. “We actually named ourselves death metal in an attempt to get away from the black metal tag, we also called ourselves doom metal, we felt very trapped by the tag ‘black metal.’ We were also involved I think in the thrash metal scene, that was music we loved and music we played, but you’re right, a lot of people focus on our connections to black metal and so be it.
“We were tagged black metal [from the start], and that’s not a surprise because particularly during the early days of Hellhammer we copied Venom, or Venom’s lyrics, to such an extent that, of course, people placed us as black metal. It became very annoying because we didn’t just want to write occult lyrics and especially after Martin joined the range of the lyrical themes became even broader.”
By the time Frost split up, the second wave of black metal was in full swing and both Hellhammer and Celtic Frost were being discovered by a new generation of fanatics, with numerous covers and tributes to both bands visible. One only need look at the pseudonyms used by Norway’s Mayhem, one of the second wave’s most important bands, to see this influence: a member named Hellhammer, not to mention Messiah, Euronymous, and Maniac—all Hellhammer song titles. Similarly, where Celtic Frost had boasted the songs “Dethroned Emperor” and “Circle of the Tyrants,” now there was a leading Norwegian band called Emperor with a release called Wrath of the Tyrant. Both bands are among the legion who have covered Hellhammer/Celtic Frost songs at some stage in t
heir career.
“I found out about all of this much later,” Tom explains. “When the black metal wave happened I was living in Texas and it wasn’t a big topic there, but Martin was in Europe and he watched all of this first-hand. I found out about it basically from interviews, when the press would interview me they would always ask about it and so I decided to look into this. At first I was extremely skeptical. Number one, I didn’t like all the black metal bands—I thought a lot of that music was repetitive and copyist, and very few bands seemed to me to do something original. Number two, I had a lot of problems with a lot of the things going on that were tied to the black metal scene and to [Hellhammer and Celtic Frost]. When the murders happened for example, all the journalists came up to me and said, ‘Well the band Hellhammer has been mentioned in conjunction to Norway and the murders.’ It became extremely uncomfortable. So I avoided the black metal scene for a long time, it was absolutely impossible for me to listen to this with an open mind, there was too much personal baggage.”
All this would eventually change. Of all the early pioneers it would be Celtic Frost, and Tom in particular, who would be most closely involved in the next generation of black metal, particularly the Scandinavian exponents of the genre. This would be evident following Frost’s return in 2001, specifically on the 2006 comeback album Monotheist. Featuring Tom and Martin, along with guitarist Erol Inala and drummer Franco Sesa, the record perhaps leaned more toward doom than black musically, but was produced by premier second-wave black metal producer Peter Tägtgren, and featured several appearances by vocalists from the Norwegian scene, such as Satyr of Satyricon and Ravn of 1349.
“The radicalness and darkness of certain black metal is what attracts me,” says Tom. “I have a hard time accepting modern death metal, it sounds very similar to me, every song uses the same guitar solo and so on, and that annoys me as an artist. Even though these guys can outplay me by a thousand times, it’s very one-dimensional music to me. Thrash music … it’s like NWOBHM, it was a product of its time and thrash metal as I define it no longer really exists. Black metal on the other hand has developed in very interesting directions. Who would have thought black metal and ambient could be merged and so on?”
Continuing where Hellhammer and Celtic Frost left off, Triptykon now forge ahead with Thomas Fischer at the helm. Photo: Peter Beste.
Indeed, the diverse philosophies of the musicians involved interests Tom just as much as the genre’s multifaceted musical identity, even if he initially found himself disappointed that they were not all the fundamental devil worshippers they initially appeared to be.
“The radicalness of some of the people—not all of them because some are of course are just projecting an image—but some of them are so radical, so determined, that it attracts me deeply, because I’m like that and I feel that common ground. The definition of Satanism is very individual and I’ve been told of personal philosophies of many of the protagonists and at first I was almost disappointed that they weren’t practicing Satanists. The one thing I noticed when I started to really involve myself in the black metal story is that so many protagonists have their own way to define what they mean by Satanism or black metal. When the black metal wave first came into recognition in the late eighties and early nineties, they all basically believed in Satan. But in the years since I’ve been exposed to so many explanations of what Satanism and black metal really is, that I find it extremely interesting.
“To me, below the line, it is really infinite hatred for mankind and the right to do whatever you want to do regardless of anyone else’s opinion or attempts to stop you. For me that defines a large amount of black metal and Satanism without going into religious topics. The misanthropic angle is very legitimate to me. In fact, I can’t help but wonder; most of my life Martin and I have fought the black metal association with Hellhammer and Celtic Frost and always made the point that our lyrics go much further than that … But at the end of the day when I listen to several of the explanations of the protagonists it comes down to nihilism and hatred against human beings, or rather the conduct of human beings, sometimes I think I’m just like them.”
Though Monotheist was hugely acclaimed, making the number two slot on Terrorizer’s top albums of the decade and leading to a number of highly successful international tours, the band’s resurrection was sadly not permanent. Following significant problems between Tom and drummer Franco, the frontman demanded a lineup change, a point that Martin was unwilling to accept, and in April 2008 Tom left the group, effectively bringing it to an end. It is a situation that seems unlikely to change anytime soon.
“Martin has told me several times since I left the band that we will work together again and I’ve told him, ‘No, that’s not going to happen.’ I feel betrayed—so much work, so much money went into bringing Celtic Frost back, it was such a gargantuan undertaking to work on this album for five and a half years, it was a risk at every level. I invested so much and in the end Martin lets it slip away, lets me stand there alone. How could I ever trust him again?”
Thankfully, the spirit of Frost continues in the shape of Triptykon, a band whose first album contains material written as a direct follow-up to Monotheist and which features Tom along with a number of musicians, including V Santora (Victor Bullok) of contemporary black metal act Dark Fortress, who had previously performed as a live guitarist in Celtic Frost.
“I formed the band with the specific aim of continuing the music of Celtic Frost,” concludes Tom, “both to play the old songs which I love to perform and to write new songs in the same vein. It’s the same equipment—I bought all the equipment from Celtic Frost—it’s the same road crew, it’s the same two record labels, Prowling Death and Century Media, it’s the same management, it’s the same graphic designers, it’s exactly Celtic Frost… The only thing that’s different is the rhythm section and the lack of ego problems.”
7
THE FIRST WAVE OF BLACK THRASH
“It’s about extraction; you almost have to search for the black metal in the albums. That was when it was interesting, it was not labeled, you had to find it for yourself, and some of that magic was maybe lost in the nineties when you could get a sticker on the album saying ‘This is black metal.’”
—Fenriz (Darkthrone)
“When we started the second wave of black metal it was that feeling we were after. Kreator, Mercyful Fate, Bathory, Celtic Frost, Venom… obviously it was not black metal, but to us it was.”
—Apollyon (Aura Noir, Immortal, Cadaver, Dødheimsgard)
THE TRADITIONAL DIVISION of the black metal movement into the first and second “waves” has long been a convenient way to distinguish between the bands from the eighties and the seemingly new movement that exploded in the early nineties—indeed, for reasons of clarity, this division is even used when appropriate within this book. However, this practice can also be somewhat misleading. Far from being two entirely separate entities, the “first wave” gently bled into the “second wave” as the eighties ended, and it was simply the sudden success, notoriety, and proliferation of bands in the early nineties that created the appearance of an entirely new scene. Norway’s Mayhem—the band at the center of much of this explosion—formed in the mid-eighties, a fact highlighting some of the confusion at work.
While Venom, Mercyful Fate, Bathory, and Hellhammer/Celtic Frost are generally considered the most pivotal in kick-starting the black metal genre, the bands in this chapter also played a significant hand in its development. Again it should be emphasized that in many cases the band’s “black metal” qualities remain a matter of interpretation, since the extreme metal scene at the time was simply too small for the sort of intense sub-genre labeling that goes on today. Back then most of these bands were simply considered acts from the darker, heavier side of thrash and indeed, as the years went on, many would evolve into a purer, less “evil”-sounding take on that genre.
The German trio of Sodom, Kreator, and Destruction, as well as the Americ
an act Slayer, are a perfect case in point. Formed in the early eighties, these three bands would increasingly be hailed as thrash icons as the decade continued, and are all still going strong today. Nevertheless, the early works of these three acts helped to inspire an entirely different movement, a fact attested to by Fenriz and Apollyon, two important figures in nineties Norwegian black metal who helped resurrect the early primal spirit of these Teutonic acts at a time when it had been all but forgotten, not least by the bands themselves. Still, it was perhaps Mayhem’s Euronymous who was most vocal in his admiration for those bands’ formative days (indeed, his label was named after Sodom’s “Deathlike Silence” song), as well as in his determination not to lose the black metal essence the way those bands had. As his interview in the fourth issue of Kill Yourself Zine explains:
“It’s quite weird that everybody talks about VENOM, BATHORY and HELLHAMMER as the old Evil bands, but nobody mentions SODOM and DESTRUCTION. They came at the same time as BATHORY and HELLHAMMER and their first albums are masterpieces of black stinking metal! Nobody manages to make music like that now.”
SODOM
Formed in 1982 in the West German town of Gelsenkirchen by one Tom Angelripper (born Thomas Such), Sodom were heavily inspired by both Motörhead and Venom. They adopted a similar setup, working as a trio with Angelripper handling vocals and bass, Aggressor (Frank Testegen) on guitar, and one Bloody Monster (Rainer Focke) handling drums. Later that same year Monster departed, to be replaced by Chris Witchhunter (real name Dudek), and the band recorded and released a four-track demo entitled Witching Metal. One of the noisiest and most chaotic-sounding metal releases in existence at that time, the tape presents Sodom as perhaps Bathory’s only real competition in terms of early metal extremity—and bear in mind, this was two years before the Scandinavian Metal Attack compilation was released.
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