Into the Void: Early EPs Part 3

Sabbat - Sabbat EP (June, 1985)

This is not the Sabbat you are thinking of. Those guys are a thrash band from the UK. These guys are a black metal band from...Japan! Yes, Japan. I'm not really sure what Japanese pop music sounded like in 1985, but if it was anything like it is today, this must have terrified them.  This release is not really an EP, it's a 7" single, with two songs—"Black Fire," and "Mion's Hill"—and they only pressed 300 of them. I mean, that alone is pretty black metal. Did I mention that it was released by "Evil Records"? Thankfully, the Internet has made these tracks available for our listening.

While they would later go on to become a trio, the band that recorded these songs was actually a quartet, featuring Gezol, Ozny, Elizaveat, and Valvin. What the fuck kind of names those are, I don't know. But so far so good for black metal tropes. The music itself has more of a simplistic thrash sound to my ears, and the vocals are just kind of...there. Gezol had yet to really develop a harsh vocal style, although he would by the band's full-length release in 1991. Still, I felt this pair of songs was fairly significant in being the first Japanese black metal. "Black Fire" is the catchier of the two tracks, and has the most intense vocal delivery.
Final Verdict: 3/10 - the album is a starting place, and not much else

Celtic Frost - Emperor's Return (Aug, 1985)

Tom G Warrior was on a creative kick back then, throwing down the Emperor's Return EP only a few months before Celtic Frost's first full length, To Mega Therion. The evershifting lineup of Celtic Frost was, at this time, Mr. Warrior on guitars and vocals, with Reed St. Mark on the skins and Martin E. Ain on bass. The album is, of course, bass-thick and dynamically rich—two hallmarks of Celtic Frost that don't seem to have had much of an effect on the black metal scene.

While I prefer Morbid Tales, Emperor's Return does include "Circle of the Tyrants," which is one of my favourite Frost songs, and, I think, features obvious black metal elements. The track contains high-speed drumming and tremolo guitars, as well as an aggressive vocal. The song would be re-recorded for To Mega Therion, and I think the version there doesn't have that same "black" feeling to it. "Visual Aggression" has an even more black metal sound, starting out with a frenzied tremolo riff and breaking into madcap drums and strangled vocal barks.

Final Verdict: The more that I work on this project, the more I hear Celtic Frost influence in later bands. It would be a grievous oversight to not include them in the first wave. That said, I don't want to rate them, as they are just as much doom and death metal as they are black metal, and so the rating wouldn't be a fair comparion to the other albums I'm reviewing.

Into the Void: Early EPs Part 2

Let's talk for a minute about what black metal is, and why I have the balls to say that bands like Celtic Frost and Venom aren't black metal. To me, "black metal" has a very recognizable and distinctive sound that was mostly defined by the Norwegians in the early 90s. As Fenriz said in 2003, "In the beginning we [the Helvete crew] were a music police, and could freeze out bands. We were so few in the scene that if we did not like a new band, then we could have a general opinion about them. If we thought they sucked, it would be a hard time for them to get through."

Obviously, this "first wave" of black metal are the bands that influnced Mayhem and Darkthrone, etc, because those bands couldn't just spring out of nowhere. And Fenriz, at the least, has always been adament that the music they make is a continuation of real 80s metal. Shagrath says that "black metal is...bands like Venom, Bathory, Celtic Frost. That is true black metal...." Then on the other hand, you have guys like Tom G. Warrior who don't care about those kind of labels at all. And Lemmy says that Motorhead isn't metal. So, I mean, at one level, it's all semantics and labels applied by critics vs. bands (see this video on whether Rush is heavy metal or not). I choose to go with a more modern and critically applied label. I think that artists are sometimes the worst people to allow to define music. They ought to stick to creating it, and whatever they want to call it, that's fine with me. 

Celtic Frost - Morbid Tales EP (Oct 1984)

Tom G. Warrior didn't waste any time between the end of Hellhammer and the start of Celtic Frost, as Morbid Tales was released in the same year as Apocalyptic Raids. Now, I've listened to Morbid Tales more than any other Celtic Frost release, and, Shagrath not withstanding, I don't think it's black metal. I don't think that any other band really sounds like Celtic Frost, and I understand why they've been called "avant garde" before. I think it's a bit misleading to call them "ahead of the curve," though, because nobody ever followed that curve to catch up with them.

So what did black metal get from Celtic Frost that they couldn't get from Bathory? Well, for one thing, the drums are much more active than in Bathory, including double bass drum lines. "Danse Macabre" has a horror movie atmosphere that certainly shows up again later in the movement. The spoken female line in "Return to the Eve" makes me think of Cradle of Filth, honestly, but that's something that we'll take up later. Frankly, I think that Morbid Tales has more to offer doom metal than black metal. The bass is extremely prominent on this album, which makes sense considering Warrior's own views on music (I read in an interview that he gave Guitar World magazine back in 2006 that he originally wanted to be a bass player).

Final Verdict: I love Morbid Tales. I think it's a great EP. I don't think it has nearly as much direct influence on the sound as Bathory or Sodom, so I'm not going to score it.

Destruction - Sentence of Death EP (Nov 1984)

Here's a new trend developing—the retarded spoken intro. If you have some grim shit to spit, I've found that playing it back slowly usually makes it sound hilarious, not sinister. That said, the rest of the EP definitely is starting to show that black metal sound. Another German trio that will go on to make some great thrash music, Destruction had plenty of Satan to shout about in 1984. Schmier almost has that snarl that Quothon had demonstrated, and his lyrics are certainly more intelligeble than Angel Ripper's on In the Sign of Evil. But he sounds like he has a massive tongue stud, and that he's lisping because he can't move his tongue enough.

The band recorded the EP with an extremly dry guitar sound, but the drums have the huge reverby splash that was much more typical of the thrash movement. This is certainly a thrash EP, and far from the "necro sound" that Bathory demonstrated. That said, the galloping guitars of thrash as executed here are definitely pointing in the direction of the tremolo guitars that will come to define black metal. It might help you to understand a bit more why I could say this if you listen to Infernal Overkill, Destruction's first full-length album that they released about six months after this EP. It just doens't have the same sound as "Total Desaster."

Final Verdict: 4/10 - Not nearly as black metal as Sodom, but has that madcap energy to it that bands like Destoyer 666 will exploit well

Into the Void: Early EPs

Let's continue our journey through early black metal with a couple of EPs from 1984. One of the tricky things with this project is figuring out in what order albums were released. I'm using a combination of Metal-archives.com and Discogs.com to determine when an album came out. Often, Metal Archives will tell me the release to the day, but sometimes it will only give a month, or at worst, a year. If something only lists a year, I will attempt to place it in that year by whether any notes are available on when it was recorded. If I am completely unable to determine something, I'm just going to cover it at the end of the year, after those albums that I have dates for.

Hellhammer - Apocalyptic Raids EP (March, 1984)

Hellhammer's work is not quite as famous as that other Tom G. Warrior band that soon tooks its place—Celtic Frost. But Hellhammer was undoubtedly an influence on the early black metal scene, so we'll cover it here. Apocalyptic Raids is the only official release of the Swiss trio, but they did have two tape demos that they released in 1983. If you like truly lo-fi recordings, you ought to check those out. Interestingly, on the demos, the band members identified themselves as "Satanic Slaughter," "Savage Damage," and "Bloodhunter," but by the release of Apocalyptic Raids, they had (mostly) adopted more normal names (Tom Fischer went by Tom G. Warrior, which is admitedly a stage name, but Bruce Day went by Denial Fiend).

So what about the music? Well, it's heavy, and extreme, but it's not quite black metal. What is it? I don't know. It's not exactly music that you can put an easy and comfortable label on. You can definitely hear elements that influenced all the extreme music that came after, from death to doom to black metal. My guess is that the biggest influence on black metal was simply the lo-fi, stripped down sound. The guitars are a bit muddy, but have that identifiable Tom G. Warrior sound. The lyrics are violent and the vocals are rough. In "Triumph of Death," especially, Tom lets loose with some real howls that hint at the vocal carnage that is yet to come into the scene. Unlike Celtic Frost, Hellhammer really has that "three kids just fooling around" vibe to it. It's the sort of thing that can make you say "I could do something like that. I will do something like that," and I think that vibe would particularly hold true for the demos.

Final Verdict: This is sloppy, organic music. It's the real shit. But it's not black metal.

 

Sodom - In the Sign of Evil (May, 1984)

Now here's something that's really starting to sound like black metal. It's the third band we've looked at, and the third power-trio. Like in Venom, the bassist also handles vocal duties, and, like in Venom, they adopt amusing pseudonyms—Angel Ripper, Grave Violator, and Witchhunter to be precise. The vocals have become much less understandable, and the tempos are speeding along. The seeds for thrash and black metal are here in about equal parts. We hear D-beats instead of the blasts that would come to define the scene, but we've got tremolo guitars and harsh vocals.

The vocals are hilariously difficult to distinguish. I won't even bother making a list of the things that I thought that I heard him sing, but let's just say that I thought that "Witching Metal" was about Doctor Who. Nevertheless, occult lyrical themes are essential. The stand-out track is clearly "Blasphemer," with the opening lyric "Black metal is the game that I play," which clearly self-identifies as black metal, even though I think that particular song has the strongest thrash sound on the EP. I think it's fair to call this 19 minute album the first proper black metal release. Sodom would, of course, go on to become a fantastic thrash band and influence death metal as well. But for now, these crazy Germans were the crest of the first wave.

Final Verdict: 5/10 - a little sloppy, plenty raw, and arguably the first