My Life on Vinyl

Artist: Celtic Frost
Album: Into the Pandemonium
Year of Release: 1987

Purchased: 1987
Purchase Price: $8.99 (?)
Vendor: Unknown
Location: Northern California

This is the most succinct explaination I have for the music of Swiss band Celtic Frost: Thomas Gabriel Fischer, the vocalist, guitarist and principal songwriter, has seen the End of Days and he’s been trying to translate his apocalyptic vision into music since 1982.

By the time of Celtic Frost’s third album, 1987’s Into the Pandemonium, Fischer (known in the heady days of the 80’s as “Tom G. Warrior”) and bassist Martin Eric Ain had transcended their early work in the embryonic (and self-confessed not very good) thrash metal band Hellhammer. This pair were joined by drummer Reed St. Mark for Celtic Frost’s previous album, 1985’s landmark To Mega Therion. To Mega Therion was the most influential of Celtic Frost’s work: Along with earlier albums by Bathory and Merciful Fate it helped to spawn the entire black and death metal sub-genres, and echos of Celtic Frost can be heard in the works of Cradle of Filth, Emperor, Dimmu Borgir, Darkthrone, Mayhem, Cannibal Corpse, and dozens of others. In contrast, Into the Pandemonium was Celtic Frost’s watershed moment, the point where they ceased to be self-referential and it became obvious that to this band “metal” was only a framework and not an end in itself. Celtic Frost seemed to completely ignore where the rest of the metal world was going as they followed their own dark muse. While the press of the day had first painted Celtic Frost with the same thrash metal brush as Metallica, Megadeth and Slayer, Frost was now being called avante garde metal. This was still an inadequate description of what was happening in the cold confines of Zurich.

Into the Pandemonium opens with an unlikely cover of Wall of Voodoo’s Mexican Radio and already it is clear that this album will not be a rehash of what has come before it. While you can hear thrash metal roots that harken back through the New Wave of British Heavy Metal to Black Sabbath, there is not the obsession with speed that was prevalent in other contemporary bands. Fischer’s lead guitar has more in common with New York’s punk trailblazer Richard Hell or Robert Fripp’s atonal work from King Crimson’s Red period than the technical precision on display from Metallica’s Kirk Hammet or Megadeth’s Dave Mustaine. By the time side one closes with Babylon Fell, it has seen Fischer work in tortured vocals that contrast his normal gutteral delivery (a precursor to the overused and occasionally amusing “Cookie Monster” vocals of modern death metal) in a fashion that echos early gothic proginators Bauhaus and Joy Division, or no wave bands like the Swans.

These unexpected artifacts of other genres are more prevelant in the second half of the album. After the doom-laden heaviness of side two’s lead track Caress into Oblivion comes One in Their Pride, a piece so jarringly different in execution that it might have come from another artist altogether. One in Their Pride is created not out of guitar riffs, heavy bass and rapid fire drumming, but drum loops and samples of radio communications from Apollo missions, violins, guitars, and other assorted instruments. The result sounds like something Herbie Hancock might have put together at the end of a 72 hour mescaline bender in the midst of a Black Mass if he had access to NASA’s audio library. It’s crazy, completely unexpected and,most remarkably, not at all out of place.

Thus, shocked out of a kind of metal-head complacency, it comes as no surprise when the next track, I Won’t Dance, adds feminine vocals to it’s chorus that sound like they might belong on a Bowie recording. Rex Irae (Requiem), the penultimate song on the album, is the sum of everything that has come before it and more: kettle drums, violins, french horns and operatic female voices join with the relentless assault of the main band. These elements weave in and out of a song structure that is a soundtrack for the reappearance of an uncaring God who will casually put an end to life on Earth. Oriental Masquerade closes out Into the Pandemonium. It is brief but fully orchestrated: a marching song for those plodding into a future that no longer has a place for humanity.

Bringing together all of these disparate parts, these seemingly unrelated echoes of influence, without falling into the trap of immitation is what I feel distinguishes Celtic Frost’s work. The band took what they loved from what came before and were inspired to create art that was their own.

I have found myself really enjoying this album, though it is surely not for everyone. Into the Pandemonium is definitely a metal album, but it’s a metal album created by a band that had aspirations to something more than being the loudest or fastest or heaviest, athough an attempt to be the darkest might not be too far off the mark. Even at that, Celtic Frost seem to be making an honest attempt to reflect their own views of the world, their angers, and possibly their fears. Isn’t that what we want from artists?

Artist: Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Album: Crosby, Stills, and Nash
Year of Release: 1969

Purchased: 1986
Purchase Price: $5.00 (?)
Vendor: Trax on Wax
Location: Temp, AZ

Does anyone else out there remember when pop singers could actually sing? Not have their vocal tracks endlessly cut, processed, and extruded by technology; not struggle to over-emote every phrase until all soul has been wrung from the lyric; but could just, you know, sing?

Not that I am averse to distorted, shouted, or even occasionally grunted vocals. This will become plainly evident when I get around to some of the albums I just can’t listen to unless the Usually-Patient-With-My-Odder-Tastes-But-Certainly-Will-Divorce-Me-If-She-Has-To-Listen-To-The-Celtic-Frost-Catalog Wife is out of the apartment.  Sometimes though it is good to be reminded what properly trained singers can accomplish when a few get together and The Muse strikes the lot of them with a twenty pound sledge.

David Crosby, Stephen Stills, and Graham Nash could really sing. They came from other popular groups who could also sing (The Byrds, Buffalo Springfield, and The Hollies respectively) and discovered that together they could sing even better. On their first self-titled album (pre-Neil Young) Crosby, Stills, and Nash sing leads and counterpoints and improvisations and some of the most heartbreakingly beautiful harmonies ever committed to a popular recording. Stephen Stills also plays lead guitar, organ, and bass while David Crosby plays rhythm guitar, and alongside session drummer Dallas Taylor a wonderful instrumental backdrop is provided for the groups vocal heroics.

If this album has one shortcoming it is a particular lyrical convention that must have made perfect sense in the burgeoning folk- and country-rock scene of late 1960s Los Angeles but now rings out as both condescending and creepy: The reference to The Female of the Species as “Lady,” or the even more jarring “Mi’Lady.” David Crosby’s song Guinnevere is the big offender on this count. I know the term is supposed to come across as charming and respectful in a nouveau-renaissance-troubadour sort of way, and probably did back when the audience was wearing caftans and fringed suede coats, but God’s Hooks it sounds awful today.

There are a couple of what have always struck me as terrific break-up songs on Crosby, Stills, and Nash in Helplessly Hoping and 49 Bye-Byes. I listened to these tracks a lot during some romantic low periods as one will, and I might have even put 49 Bye-Byes on a mix tape. Sometimes I hate being reminded of when I was a bit moist, had my own pair of moccasins with fringe on them, and thought hippies were pretty okay rather than in need of a wash.

It’s a testament to how strong this album is that, in spite of the above problem with gender identification terms and my general disdain for anyone who identified themselves as members of the love generation, Crosby Stills and Nash remains a stunner of an accomplishment 40 years after its release. The majestic opening track Suite: Judy Blue Eyes, Still’s and Crosby’s dark and plaintive Wooden Ships, Crosby’s soulful Long Time Gone, Nash’s playful Marrakesh Express… heck practically every darn track on the album is a triumph.

If Crosby, Stills, and Nash smacks occasionally of Flower Power it turns out to be stronger for it, a reminder that true artists will invariably capture the zeitgeist in which they work. Listening to this album makes me aware of my own ossified attitudes toward the period in which it was created. I won’t be splashing myself with patchouli oil anytime soon, but that fact shouldn’t blind me to the worthy musical accomplishments of the time… past or present.

Artist: Blue Oyster Cult
Album: Spectres
Year of Release: 1977

Purchased: June 1987
Purchase Price: $1.00
Vendor: Rasputin Records
Location: Pleasant Hill, CA

You probably need a predisposition to liking ‘70s era hard rock, and goodness knows I am chock full of that particular like, to enjoy Blue Oyster Cult in this day and age. If you dig Queens of the Stone Age or Tool, the barrier to digging at least some of Blue Oyster Cult’s output should be pretty low.

Blue Oyster Cult are odd… in a really good way.

Upon listening in full for the first time in well over a decade, Spectres turns out to be a curious mix of working-class Long Island bar band with classical precision, post-Hendrix guitar heroism and bizarre lyrical subject matter. Strange visions of post-apocalyptic struggle, doomed psychic lovers, futuristic vistas and the undead rub shoulders with snatches of arena-crowd pleasing four-bar blues, funky rhythms, and doo-wop inspired call and response vocals. Sometimes all of these things happen in the same song.

The results are something of a mixed bag. When this album works, it really works, as in the case of the Side 2 opening burner R. U. Ready 2 Rock (predating Prince’s similar naming conventions by about five years, although I think maybe P-Funk were doing this sort of thing before ’77). R.U. Ready 2 Rock seems like it’s going to be a standard arena-crowd pleaser, and then you realize Eric Bloom is singing a refrain about only living to be born again and you wonder how they managed to work in an oblique reference to Osiris alongside the standard sexual connotations of “who will rock with you?” Other good tracks are The Golden Age of Leather (a great ditty about warring motorcycle gangs with overtones of Broadway and Ragnarok – no, I’m not kidding), I Love the Night, and Nosferatu. With only one exception the rest of the songs are pretty forgettable… but what an exception.

That exception is Godzilla, the opening track of the album and as fine an example of 1970s hard rock as one is likely to find. Certainly one of the best three or four songs BOC ever cut, not to mention the highest charting song about the King of Monsters in the history of recorded music (Spectres hit #43 on the Billboard charts). While lead guitarist Donald “Buck Dharma” Roeser makes even the throw-away tracks on Spectres worth at least one listen, his work on Godzilla makes me wonder exactly how many ideas for riffs and licks he had that he could afford to put so many good ones in one song. I was actually overcome with glee once when Godzilla was played in a Chicago bar I was visiting in 2006.  It has been so long since I had heard Godzilla outside the accursed context of “Classic Rock” radio that just knowing there was a DJ out there who would play the song of his own free will made me giddy.

This was the initial, automatic post that Wordpress generates when one creates new weblog. I’m leaving it here, along with the picture of the Kesuke Family mostly because Genichiro Tenryu in that badass robe makes me happy.