The Pinnacle of Tone Mountain, Part 2 – 91%
iamntbatman, March 19th, 2017
This album is the answer to that most vital of questions: “What would happen if a trio of barbarians wandered into the studio where Celtic Frost had just finished recording their landmark Monotheist album, who had packed up their keyboards, violins and black-lipsticked corsetted guest vocalist to go beanie shopping or whatever, and used the still-white-hot amps to record the soundtrack to crushing your enemies, seeing them driven before you, and hearing the lamentations of their women?” I’m not really one for reading up on scene gossip or getting really into interviews and other such peripheral things, so I can’t say with any certainty what sort of mindset drove Cianide to record an album like this, but I can’t help but think this was intended as a direct response to Monotheist itself.
Right off the bat, the sonic similarity is almost uncanny. This is mastered just a little less overbearingly loud, which is a godsend really as that helps alleviate some of the ear fatigue, but I’ll be damned if our heroes from Chicago didn’t do a bang-up job of capturing that exact same sublimely overdriven guitar tone that helped to propel Celtic Frost’s swansong into the upper stratosphere of metal history. But this is Cianide, so rather than seventy plus minutes of bloated gothic metal-infused doom with too-long songs that never capitalize on the potential of their own ingredients, here we get a forty minute neck-obliterating skullfuck that’s probably more high-energy than anything the band has recorded. To me, it sounds like a band firmly set in its ways who felt the need to play up on their own Celtic Frosted heritage to make the album that, perhaps to them, is what Monotheist should’ve sounded like.
So yeah, the riffs are dead simple, as are the songs themselves, but for all their chugging palm-mutes and hellish tremolo that never once ventures beyond what you might expect from an unflinchingly conservative death/doom band in the 21st century, there’s also not a single stinker of a riff on the whole album. By this time the band had plenty of time to reflect on their earlier material, to know when and why it succeeded, had revisited their influences and later entries in the genre enough to learn strengths and weaknesses common to the style. The more violent, quick-paced style favored here was also right at home on Hell’s Headbangers at the time, and no doubt was a welcome set of songs to add to playlists for the band’s reinvigorated live show schedule right around the same time as this album’s release, with pit-ready rippers like “Idolator,” “Terrorstrikes” and “Desecration Storm” working perfectly alongside this album’s doomier tracks (“Dead and Rotting” and “One True Death”) as well as the slower material from the band’s more famous 90’s era.
Apart from it just kicking ass aplenty, a big part of why I find this album so enjoyable is that it’s hard for me to listen to it without comparing it to the aforementioned Monotheist. The similarity in guitar tone and overall production, paired with Cianide’s clear musical debt to Celtic Frost/Hellhammer, makes this something of a companion album to that grand but ultimately disappointing experiment, one with a much less ambitious goal but one which it accomplishes with ferocious success. That the band was so perfectly able to answer that “what if” scenario I painted at the beginning of this review speaks not only to their abilities as musicians but also right to my amygdala or whatever part of your brain that makes you just want to listen to smash-everything riffs and wake up sore and happy the next day. So if, like me, you’ve listened to Monotheist a whole bunch of times and fairly often you were left wondering “yeah ok, but why aren’t there more and better RIFFS?” then I can’t really recommend this album enough.
Now, if only there were a better answer to the question, “what would happen if Celtic Frost left the studio just after recording Monotheist, but left everything on and even left the goth vocalist girl there, and then some better band went in there and recorded a better version of that same album where the riffs were stronger and better woven together with the gothic doom stuff?” That, I’d like to hear.
rafazardly 