I haven't been posting much lately, work has pretty much sucked all of my brainpower. However, I heard this album again this afternoon, and I must speak out.Celtic Frost is hugely influential in extreme metal. The Swiss metal masters came around in the early 1980's and helped to influence the thrash, death, and black metal scenes. This was through their years as Hellhammer and through their first full-length album To Mega Therion. The band though has a couple of clunkers. However, I have never heard the glam metal Cold Lake. This album though, I have heard. This was the beginning of the band's avant-garde style, and it is fucking weird.
The album starts off strange, with the cover of Wall of Voodoo's "Mexican Radio". It's not a bad song, but the original is horrendous which makes me wonder what the hell the band was thinking when deciding to cover it. The next track is "Mesmerized" which is a pretty good song, but kind of bizarre vocally. Tom Warrior's vocals are typically delivered in a husky grunt, but this song showed Warrior's cleaner vocal style. The sound is more of a wail and it is certainly interesting, but this is just the beginning.
The next track is standard Celtic Frost proto-death, but then we get to "Tristesses de la Lune" which features a female opera singer, singing in French over heavy usage of keyboards. What the fuck? Afterwards things become a little more normal, until we get to "One in Their Pride", which sounds more like a hip hop instrumental, than a Celtic Frost song. Much of the rest of the album is closer to typical Celtic Frost.
Yes, there are some typical Celtic Frost songs on here, but there is an awful lot of filler and it makes this an incredibly uneven listening experience. The good songs are great, but the filler songs are awful and are painful to listen to. After the masterful To Mega Therion, this cannot be seen as anything but a massive step backwards.
No comments:
Post a Comment