Celtic Frost – Monotheist (2006)

Celtic Frost are from Switzerland and ‘Monotheist’ is generally regarded as a come-back album from one of the great lost bands of metal. Three albums in, they delivered a magnum opus in ‘Into The Pandemonium’. The record company hated it as much as the critics loved it, failed to promote it and sales bombed. They rebounded with the widely derided ‘Cold Lake’ and promptly vanished from sight for a decade. So ‘Monotheist’ was met with a mixture of equal parts anticipation and aprehension amongst the metal community.

But before digging into ‘Monotheist’, there are certain doctrinal niceties to be considered. Metal fans can rival Welsh chapel goers in their capacity for extreme sectarianism. So with Celtic Frost, are we talking Black Metal, here? Or grindcore? Or thrash, doom, death, death-ambient, extreme-death, progressive metal or even plain, old-fashioned heavy metal? Or how about rock, even?

Nominally, Celtic Frost are one of the most influential forerunners of the black/death metal genre but, truth be told, ‘Monotheist’ demonstrates a pretty polytheistic approach, incorporating bits and pieces from all or any of the above as needed. Still, the record has two main modes of operation. overall Lead-off track ‘Progeny’ and or ‘Ain Elohim’ (got to love those funky song titles) deliver full-bore bludgeoning staccato riffing and machine-gun drums, interspersed with neck-snapping tempo changes. ‘Ground’ and ‘A Dying God Coming Into Human Flesh’ (fabulous title) are slower, based on creeping guitars lines wrapped around the production like finely tuned smog.
The honed production and (believe it or not) song writing are what positions ‘Monotheism’ as worth serious attention. That and the fact that a man growling “Oh My God Why Have You Forsaken Me?” for ten minutes or so over a primeval stomp of a riff that would do early Killing Joke credit is as good a soundtrack for the early Monday morning walk to the Underground as anything else I’ve heard recently.

The guitars sound amazing. On ‘Progeny’, they go off like over-sized motorbikes revving up. ‘Os Abysmi…’ (hope I’m not getting into some kind of trouble by writing these titles down) is layered and glacial. Then, just when the grind and bombast might be starting to get a bit much, they’ll throw in a curveball. ‘Obscured’, for instance, comes across as a dead ringer for the Sisters’ ‘Some Kind Of Stranger’ featuring breathy female harmonies, almost convention heavy rock guitars and a hypnotic, cylcing chord sequence. ‘Totengott’ has atmospheric swirls of synth and guitar feedback hovering behind a gruesome, graveyard croak of a narrative. But ‘Synagoga Satanae’ (and no, I don’t want to speculate about the possibility of a black metal chapter of “Jews for Satan”) is the piece de resistance – fourteen minutes of Sabbath creep and clang that’ll either leave you a convert or reaching for John Denver.

Then there’s the lyrics. Actually, let’s not dwell on those. They aren’t very nice. Flesh dies, spirits rot, rain falls, gods decay, darkness reigns and so on. Johnny Cash would have blanched. But trust me, like The Shining or Buffy the Vampire Slayer, this stuff draws you in. You have to take it on its own terms and musically, it’s powerful and compelling enough to offer you little choice.

Pop Matters has an interview & review. Celtic Frost’s homepage has some entertainingly gruesome looking videos and true enthusiasts can learn how to apply corpse paint and then get their efforts rated.