Worthy! – 91%
Napero, November 13th, 2010
With a career as long, influential and illustrous as that of the almighty Celtic Frost, most commercially succesful bands start churning out compilations and best-ofs at an alarming rate. Not so with Celtic Frost, they didn’t release an actual best-of album before their reunion and the 2003 Are You Morbid?, and kept their original, beautiful run clean of such trivial and unnecessary cash grabs. What, then, is Parched with Thirst Am I and Dying?
Parched with Thirst Am I and Dying is a compilation of things in the way compilations are supposed to be made. Instead of simply skimming the cream from the top and arbitrarily choosing the “top” tracks for those people who are too lazy or poor to get the original albums, Celtic Frost offers some interesting stuff on the compilation. No, this is not a “best-of”. A few unreleased tracks that were only included on re-releases of their respective albums after this compilation saw daylight, a few alternative versions of familiar tracks, and incredible honesty in the form of several Cold Lake songs.
Perhaps the most rewarding part of the compilation is the fact that the songs chosen are holotypes of their respective albums, and the few previously unreleased tracks are obvious children of their recording sessions as well. “Descent to Babylon” and “The Inevitable Factor” reek of Into the Pandemonium, and the tracks chosen off Vanity/Nemesis are perfect examples of the litter they sprang from. Uniquely, this leads to a an interesting situation: the tracks recreate the band’s career, excluding Morbid Tales, in an zig-zagging mess, but still keep things interesting with the previously unreleased tracks and alternative versions.
As a cross-cut of the lengthy and complex Celtic Frost history, the compilation, and especially its longer 18-track CD version, works wonders. It hauls the listener from the Emperor’s Return era straightforward angry blackened thrashing, through the To Mega Therion‘s budding avant-garde and Into the Pandemonium‘s full-blown atmospheric experiments, all the way into the strange and confusing poppy alien surroundings, taking the re-recorded detour via the crater of failure known as Cold Lake. There isn’t much else to say, although the lack of songs from Morbid Tales strikes a fan of the band as odd. Why by-pass such an important EP? We may never know, but if a compilation is supposed to have a “flow”, or simply to stay together as a pleasurable listening experience, Morbid Tales’ Hellhammerish and abrasive character might have interrupted the story arch, and disturbed the progression of the alien feel of Celtic Frost’s later works.
It would be very interesting to see such a compilation now. How would the slow, crushing and primal despair of Monotheist fit the works of Frost’s earlier career? Can the two be combined at all, with the 16 years between Vanity/Nemesis and Monotheist, or is the hidden progression that took place during the decade and a half something that can’t be bridged at all? We may never know. It’s quite likely that the creative restraint of the band is too perfect for a post-mortem. At least judging by the rarity of such releases so far. We may now enjoy Triptykon, and if the title track of the Shatter EP is anything to judge by, Celtic Frost didn’t die due to lack of creativity. Martin Eric Ain’s contributions to the world of music still remain to be seen, but the promise is there.
rafazardly 