The Mosh Pit 11.27.09: Black Friday

Posted by Dan Haggerty on 11.27.2009

On the most commercial day of the year, the Mosh Pit looks at the three most noncommercial albums that would shape extreme metal: Venom with Black Metal, Celtic Frost with To Mega Therion, and Possessed with Seven Churches. Click the link to check out the underground classics that shook the metal scene and predicted the dark music to come!

Black Friday

As I sat about thinking about the column my thoughts went to the fact it comes out on the biggest shopping day of the year. Hmmm… I had already ripped into commercialism and the fatal conceit that is McMetal so I couldn't do that again. Besides, I don't have anything personally against commercialism or mainstream music outside of when it gets punched out with obviously cookie-cutter intent based on bean counters and demographic data.

But the name of the day itself, "Black Friday" held more promise. Friday is called that because this is the day many retailers' books go from the red (i.e. losing money) to the black (making money). Thus most retailers need the holidays to provide life support for the whole year. The name however is just way too much to pass on. There is a certain irony that something in accounting (going from red ink to black) is a good thing but in the arts black is generally considered bad.

Unless you're into metal or related fields from punk like goth, then black is good.

Thus here we are. My take on Black Friday is to go back and look at a few albums that were bridges from classic metal to the darkest music to make extreme its home. These aren't necessarily the first, but they were cornerstones of metal evolution and for any punter who likes to explore his music scene these were the missing links. Sadly overlooked unless you're neck deep in already, this week we'll look at three verified classics that knocked us back when they came out and pointed the way for future bands.

It's few lost gems of extreme for the extreme shopping day of the year. And if you have that friend, brother, kid, or whatever that loves metal music try to pick one of these up for them. They'll be on their way to some of the best secrets in metal and miles ahead of what their friends are listening to.



Venom – Black Metal





Some bands took metal to the next level by going out and making a musical statement. Venom, may the infernal powers bless the crazy bastards, decided what they wanted and then went straight to 10 on the statement-o-meter. Only problem was, musically, they really didn't know what in the hell they were doing. Instead of musical chops you got choppy music. Little things like keeping time in the drum section or even playing together wasn't always the idea on this thing.

Any yet it's a classic in its own right. Proper performances be damned, the tone of the album would inspire whole legions of new music in a decade, the content of the lyrics would be a mini-revolution into themselves, and the actual measure of means ripping through these thrice damned tracks would go on to be the sound of extreme. It's 1982 and this album was that far ahead of it's time. You can make the case extreme metal would not have evolved till much later without these dudes, and the fact that every other thrash band still trading demos wore their swag spoke volumes (check out some old Metallica pictures circa Kill Em All sometime for example).

It might have been loose and sloppy, but the end result was a car crash that would create more than it would destroy. This thing hit the metal scene out of no where and got a similar reaction to what Merciful Fate would get soon, in the "I can't believe they're doing this!" category. This is considered to be a founding album of black and to an extent death metal for a reason after all, even if the sound is more proto-black with elements of death. Really, it's the sign post pointing to the future here with a heavy nod to the title of the album. In reality it's NWOBHM dragged through proto-thrash and a warm bottle of jack left out for several days.

This one could have also made the cut as an old fashion nod to paganism thanks to the lyrics, but the music and overall experience tells another tale from my perspective. The real story the delivery of this stripped down and harsh thrash-like scare is the vocal performance of Cronos. The dude puts on the performance of a life time that conveys the actual emotions of the lyrics, and with subject matter like "Leave Me in Hell" and "Sacrifice" you know those emotions are none to bright. And the song "Buried Alive" is nothing more than the definition of terrifying as Cronos' voice portrays the idea so livid I can picture him getting buried alive. Metal was going from the usual NWOBHM material and with a rocket strapped to its back was launched into darker soundscapes.

No doubt about it, this one freaked us long haired partiers out back in the day. People talked a good game, but we just didn't believe anyone would show up and actually mean it. This put the world on notice that metal was going to go dark places and mean it. The band got laughed at by other musicians, but they failed to notice all the young kids taking notes in the audience. And those kids where going to take the idea and go on a killing spree in a few short years. Underneath the hood was the mechanics for a sound a lot of people were going to engineer into a killing machine and engineer they did.









Celtic Frost – To Mega Therion





If Black Metal was the full blow to the stomach of the metal scene, then this was the steel blade to its ribs; a sterling steel sword cutting at high speed like a wall of noise, shredding sensibilities. Venom delivered a tough blow once and then laughed at you about it. Celtic Frost ripped you to shreds with a thousand fast cuts then left you alone to contemplate why the universe was so cruel. Basically, they went from zero to extreme in a whole new way that was brutal but chilling. Like Venom, they were pointing the way to a sound that was still years to come.

The most notable thing that jumps out at you is the production. Or should I say the seeming absence of it. The best description I've heard another use was to compare this to a performance in a vacuum – So empty it's clean. No joke, it makes And Justice For All sound warm and full bodied. The total lack of anything resembling full bodied gives it that chilly feel, alone in the wastes and alien, a total sonic assault that supports the band's name as truth advertising.

And yet, once you listen to this, you can feel the heaviness of it and the presence of the bass in that heaviness. It's like the bottom end is less about low frequencies and more about deep impact, a hard to explain ideal that the production pulls off since this is frosted over and yet carries so much weight. Likely, the distortion in the guitars helps this juxtaposition along, making the sound a sum total like a composition of weighty cold tectonic plates that deceives when broken into their composite pieces.

Maybe it's the enigma of that which gives this enigma of a band their legs to have a catalog that is literally all over the place on every album. From proto-black, to extreme thrash, to glam, to doom, Warrior and company have been all over the damn map in their career.

On the positive side, it also gives To Mega Therion a defining characteristic. Also, it leaves the music exposed with no tricks. It's just you and the sound, a symphony of fast caustic extreme axes slashing away with tight precision. The album might sound empty, but that emptiness shows off the majesty of the compositions. And really, the compositions are mind blowing – Assuming you don't mind the frost bite trying to warm up to them. From fast distorted axes freezing your ears with sprays of liquid nitrogen on "The Usurper", all the way to smashing those frozen ears under the doomy weight of "Dawn of Meggido". This was thrash before there was thrash, black before their darkness, and Lovecraft decades after The Mountain Of Madness.

A billion points to those who got that.








Possessed – Seven Churches







From the bands pointing the way to black and death, we come to the band that would do this and actual bridge the extreme of its day (thrash) to the extreme that was to come (death). In fact, the band's song "Death Metal" is often pointed to as the reason why this album is considered the first death metal album proper. The reality is that this isn't death metal but it is damn close, more of the entry chamber before entering the dungeon itself.

I've sad it before and I'll say it again, Possessed is one of the most influential bands most people haven't heard of. They are with a tight pocket of bands that had more impact than recognition, a band for other bands, and music that in a just world should have sold way more than they ever did. I've often joked death is thrash on red bull, which is a cute comparison to explain death to the uninformed. I've also called it the extreme sport version of thrash to help those people along. But those descriptions are in truth way to simplified. There is more to death in tone, content, technique, and whatnot. Also, a lot of death metal today has forgotten the riffs that made thrash so damn good, but that is a column for another time. Bottom line this has the best of both worlds and remains a titan of the metal scene for it. You can see it splayed out in an album that keeps the structure of thrash but judiciously weaves all those future wonders through excellent writing and total balls to the wall attitude.

The songs? Well, they follow the model of early slayer in the idea of hitting fast and hard, track after track. This is the kind of album people will say sounds the same throughout, but that's because it follows the future template of letting the riffs and leads do the talking. It's not that your getting your limbs ripped off and beat with them for 40 minutes; it's how you're getting hit for that time. One lead puts the whammy bar in the insane asylum for treatment while the other shreds your speakers. Everything else is incidental to the axes tearing the house down while Becerra rains damnation down on you.

Speaking of which, at the time we had to laugh at the Tipp Gore Brigade, sitting in Washington and whining on someone else's dime about the evils of Twisted Sister, Ozzy, and Prince while bands like Possessed where actually smearing the occult in your face with songs like "Pentagram". Talk about a hole in logic you could drive a Mack truck through.

And a Mack truck is exactly what the band did drive into you when the album opens with the heavy as all fucking hell "The Exorcist". And it not just the fact this is thrash turned up and played faster and meaner, or that the riffs rock (which they do), but that those axes just roars all over the damn place. Much like getting hit by the truck, you keep getting crushed fast and in new locations. It might be a little chaotic for some, but this is a tightly controlled chaos with purpose, and that purpose just ran your ass over. 10 songs later and you're lying there flat on the pavement as the truck keeps on rolling down the Interstate 666. Really, every song on here smokes but if you want extra bites check out "Burn In Hell" which truth be told is the gold standard in death metal. The title track which shows some of the best riffs burned into vinyl. The musical chops of "Twisted Minds" which does more with melody in creative fashions than imitators do today on an entire disc. Or just check out the thrash gone brutal for brutality sake in "Death Metal" if you want destruction if you want another look at Darwinian-metal at work.









That's a warp. Hope you survived Thanksgiving, relatives (we should get a day off after the holiday to recover from them as well), and Black Friday. If not, you know what to do. Pull a classic from the shelf and play the mother on 10. If someone bitches, shove some turkey in them, raise the horns, and tell them we said hi!