bidhardcore.com

Welcome to another Metal Monday, this being the 5th. First cool thing I spotted for the installment before you, is this original Thergothon demo tape on “Wild Rags”. To be exact, the title of the demo is Yog Sothoth. One of the many rules of Heavy Metal is that if you can’t pronounce something, it’s either taken from an H.P. Lovecraft story, or it’s in a foreign language, (more likely the former though). As I’m not a huge fan, personally I may be wrong, but I recall Yog Sothoth as one of Lovecraft’s “Great Old Ones” who’s since been appropriated into junk like the recent monster movie Cloverfield. Also the frequent appearance of tentacled monsters on Thergothon items tipped me off to this. If you’ve ever read Lovecraft you know that it lumbers along with a sort of grotesque and Gothic fixation on all things unholy and profane. Thergothon really is a band that captures that feeling perfectly with the music on this demo, and their lone album, Stream From the Heavens, which cemented them forevermore as a pioneer of the Funeral Doom genre. The songs move so slowly, that even if it was sped up to double time it would still be slow. The vocals so gutteral it may as well be Cthulu himself speaking to you, and the music so sombre and cold, it feels like it’s coming from that Cyclopian world of misery and doom. It’s very dramatic yes, but also effective, and truly fitting of its title. Really I can’t think of a single band that is more downbeat and dreadful sounding than Thergothon.

Additionally I picked out a couple of Tom Warrior’s better works. First of all there’s this Hellhammer “Apocalyptic Raids” 12″ on Noise. Note that it’s original, not a repress on Combat, or some other bizzaro repress. By many accounts this thing was absolutely reviled by “professional” metal types when it came out. I guess it just took a minute for some people to get it, but boy do they ever now. You can pre-order (i believe on ebay via various distributors) an upcoming, deluxe 3lp boxset of chronicling pretty much all of the known Hellhammer demos, including some not really in circulation. I believe Century Media is at least in part issuing this, so it’s something of a professional production. On the other end of the spectrum you have Thomas Gabriel Ficsher Warrior’s arguably most ambitious, (though no less pretentious - that is always ranked at a 10 out of 10) release, Into The Pandemonium; Celtic Frost’s, 3rd lp (also the original Noise pressing). Now truthfully finding a copy of this album is neither hard, nor a pricey endeavor, but I want to note it because I personally find it to be a compelling and under appreciated album. I can’t say it is the best Celtic Frost album, but I sometimes can say I feel it is my favorite (and I’ve thought about it at great length). I understand it’s an instant turn-off for a lot of people with  this album stating with a cover of Mexican Radio, which I almost don’t consider part of the real album picture, but once Mesmerized kicks in, I think there’s a lot to sink your teeth into. It has a heavy groove, it flirts with melody, but to me anyway, it doesn’t feel like the band losing their sound like you could say they did on Cold Lake. It just brings some of the obvious gothy vibes that are more below the surface on earlier releases, into the light. When I went to see the reunited incarnation of Frost in 2007, they played only one song from this album (Mesmerized), and even after nearly 45 minutes of nothing but material from the first 2 albums, at least half the people watching looked bored or annoyed that they decided to play this number. In fact hardly anyone seems to make mention of how Monotheist, their first release since reuniting, draws as heavily from the goth type atmospherics, and experimental moments on Into the Pandemonium as it does from earlier phases of the band, or for that matter, from groups like Gorgoroth and Satyricon, who themselves were originally followers of Hellhammer and Frost. What I’m trying to say is that anyone who considers Into Pandemonium b-cannon is the kind of person that doesn’t listen to Sabbath Bloody Sabbath because “it’s got too many keyboards on it”. In other words, a fool. Tracks like Mesmerized, and Caress Into Oblivion are where I picture Sheer Terror getting the inspiration to come out and do a number like Roses.