Celtic Frost - Monotheist
Suggested by: MH
MH: Now I just did a review for IQ saying how certain genres need to be taken in small amounts, right? Well, this one definitely falls into that category. Whenever these songs come on random, I am so excited and am happy with the aural assault that they do to my ears, but as I tried to listen to the whole album, I find my mind wandering. I think the music is great. The guitars are fantastic. It's heavy, aggressive, evil, all that shit. But I'm so ready for the album to be over. Now I once read in a Lester Bangs book, that music is perfect in it's form, and if you don't like a certain kind of music, it's just that your brain may not be ready to process it. I've struggled with that alot. I mean, I have been a convert to certain types of music or artists, and I feel this is true. But sometimes after I am listening to this type of death metal, I want to listen to something super adult contemporary. Like Melissa Manchester or The Mighty Barry Manilow. Just as a pallet cleanse. I'm sure that I will always have this as an option to listen to, but am not sure if I'm gonna pull it out at a party. Like I would pull out Bootylicious or Funkadelic.
I did put the song 'Winter' on my Christmas cd that I gave out to my family. It's properly gothic and gorgeous. It's an instrumental with a lot of forboding strings doing really long notes. Plenty of dischord and dissonance, too. It brings up imagery of cold, old drafty churches, solitude, and your hands and feet never getting quite warm enough. Which is the emotion that I'm sure they were going for. Mission accomplished, my death metallists. I ain't mad atcha. And is it pronounced Celtic with a "Kel" or Celtic, like the fabulous Boston Celtics? The mind reels....
MJ: Now this is some evil shit. And I love it. Kind of doomy in parts, with really crunchy riffs. I usually like good-quality doom metal – slow that shit down and just beat me over the head with that slow and sludgy, deep, dark and nasty jam.
This falls into that category of fairly brutal metal with that little extra something that keeps it on the side of good as opposed to monotonous crap. And that can be a very thin line, my friend.
When I first started listening to this several months ago, it struck me as the kind of music that I just couldn’t listen to straight through. Just a bit TOO much you know. But even in a period when I haven’t been listening to too much metal, this sounded really good to me – and I happily went the distance.
I think there is a lot of emotion on this album. The song “Ground” with the repetitive lyrics: “Oh God….why have you forsaken me…” is pretty damn intense. I mean, he means what he’s singing. A lot of the vocals on this album are repetitive, but to a good overall effect, in my opinion.
I really like this singer’s voice as well. It’s very effective in its evilness, but not so over the top that you can’t understand anything. Sometimes it even sounds a bit gothic, a la Peter Murphy of Bauhaus.
This was a good pick to start rounding out year. It was the AOTW in effect through Christmas Eve. I feel that we have officially exorcised the demons of 2006…
No comments:
Post a Comment