Celtic Frost
Morbid Tales /
Emperor's Return
[Noise]
While I still prefer Hellhammer (the band that spawned Celtic
Frost), there's no denying the mightiness of these first two
albums (or EPs depending on your point of view)...
What we've got here is 46 minutes, 11 tracks of morbidly doomy death/black metal - at times it's frantic and quick paced, while at others it crawls on all fours like some lethargic lycanthrope. It's actually quite difficult to describe Celtic Frost and do them any justice - the basic ingredients to their sound are dissected easily enough (down-tuned bottom end saturated (yet still sharp sounding) guitars, powerfully dominant bass, simplistic and thundering drums, and guttural "gruff as sandpaper on your genitalia" vocals that are more grunted than sung), but this is a case where the sum of the parts does not manage to equal the total. One could also try drawing comparisons to other artists in order to describe them (the bastard sons of Venom, Motorhead and Black Sabbath) but this also comes nowhere near fully explaining Celtic Frost. No - this is a band that has to be heard in order to be fully understood, and the only way to really gauge a Celtic Frost album is to compare it to their other releases. Working under that proclamation, these two albums/EPs contain the most violent and thrashy (no, not in the American thrash metal sense - more in a "just get the job done and fuck the finesse" manner) material ever laid to tape by Tom Warrior and company. It's not the doom obsessed Frost of "To Mega Therion", and neither is it the gothic / experimental Frost of "Into The Pandemonium" - this is the primal, visceral early Celtic Frost that still had a lot of anger that needed to be vented, and "Morbid Tales / Emperor's Return" was the outlet. The two albums are very similar to each other in many ways (so much so that when they were released in North America, half of "Emperor's Return" ended up on "Morbid Tales", with the remaining tracks being issued out as a 12" EP) - there are slight production differences (most noticeable on the tracks "Suicidal Winds" and "Visual Aggression" which seem to have a thinner sound than the rest of the material on display here), but apart from that, you'd hardly be able to tell the two sessions were recorded seven months apart (credit for this should be given to both Celtic Frost (for writing such concise material) and to Horst Muller, the producer who worked with them on all their seminal early recordings).
To call this CD essential would be a massive understatement. I think any metalhead worth their salt should already own this and be nodding their head in agreement with the above. There's no two ways about it, you NEED this CD in your collection - I suppose I should comment on the fact that as of the writing of this review, there are mainly two different versions currently floating around - one that comes in a normal jewel case and that uses the "Emperor's Return" cover/band picture, and a recently issued digipac (I believe) that uses the "Morbid Tales" cover - this second version also contains the entire Hellhammer "Apocalyptic Raids" EP along with the bonus tracks from the CD reissue, and is by far the better of the two versions (aesthetically that is). There was also a North American pressing of this on tape format that had a drastically different cover (I'd never seen it before), but I've no idea if it ever made it's way onto CD...and to further add to this, I hear there's some talk of a Celtic Frost box-set which will (if I understood Mr Warrior's statement correctly) restore all the releases back to their original form (complete with all the original artwork), but at the same time I hear he plans to replace all the older Celtic Frost logos with the "newer" logo (from "Cold Lake" onwards) on all the re-issues...a plan which makes no sense to me at all...there's no firm details of this yet, so we'll just have to wait and see...
© 1999 chorazaim
What we've got here is 46 minutes, 11 tracks of morbidly doomy death/black metal - at times it's frantic and quick paced, while at others it crawls on all fours like some lethargic lycanthrope. It's actually quite difficult to describe Celtic Frost and do them any justice - the basic ingredients to their sound are dissected easily enough (down-tuned bottom end saturated (yet still sharp sounding) guitars, powerfully dominant bass, simplistic and thundering drums, and guttural "gruff as sandpaper on your genitalia" vocals that are more grunted than sung), but this is a case where the sum of the parts does not manage to equal the total. One could also try drawing comparisons to other artists in order to describe them (the bastard sons of Venom, Motorhead and Black Sabbath) but this also comes nowhere near fully explaining Celtic Frost. No - this is a band that has to be heard in order to be fully understood, and the only way to really gauge a Celtic Frost album is to compare it to their other releases. Working under that proclamation, these two albums/EPs contain the most violent and thrashy (no, not in the American thrash metal sense - more in a "just get the job done and fuck the finesse" manner) material ever laid to tape by Tom Warrior and company. It's not the doom obsessed Frost of "To Mega Therion", and neither is it the gothic / experimental Frost of "Into The Pandemonium" - this is the primal, visceral early Celtic Frost that still had a lot of anger that needed to be vented, and "Morbid Tales / Emperor's Return" was the outlet. The two albums are very similar to each other in many ways (so much so that when they were released in North America, half of "Emperor's Return" ended up on "Morbid Tales", with the remaining tracks being issued out as a 12" EP) - there are slight production differences (most noticeable on the tracks "Suicidal Winds" and "Visual Aggression" which seem to have a thinner sound than the rest of the material on display here), but apart from that, you'd hardly be able to tell the two sessions were recorded seven months apart (credit for this should be given to both Celtic Frost (for writing such concise material) and to Horst Muller, the producer who worked with them on all their seminal early recordings).
To call this CD essential would be a massive understatement. I think any metalhead worth their salt should already own this and be nodding their head in agreement with the above. There's no two ways about it, you NEED this CD in your collection - I suppose I should comment on the fact that as of the writing of this review, there are mainly two different versions currently floating around - one that comes in a normal jewel case and that uses the "Emperor's Return" cover/band picture, and a recently issued digipac (I believe) that uses the "Morbid Tales" cover - this second version also contains the entire Hellhammer "Apocalyptic Raids" EP along with the bonus tracks from the CD reissue, and is by far the better of the two versions (aesthetically that is). There was also a North American pressing of this on tape format that had a drastically different cover (I'd never seen it before), but I've no idea if it ever made it's way onto CD...and to further add to this, I hear there's some talk of a Celtic Frost box-set which will (if I understood Mr Warrior's statement correctly) restore all the releases back to their original form (complete with all the original artwork), but at the same time I hear he plans to replace all the older Celtic Frost logos with the "newer" logo (from "Cold Lake" onwards) on all the re-issues...a plan which makes no sense to me at all...there's no firm details of this yet, so we'll just have to wait and see...
© 1999 chorazaim