Celtic Frost — Monotheist

Monotheist stands as one of the most devastating, darkly poetic and mournful comebacks ever. It’s staggering how a band that most people wrote off as a lost, near on 17 years ago with the release of Cold Lake, have managed to create such a twisted heavy beast of an album, that still trickles with a eye for dark experimentations. It towers above the listeners like a sinister black monolith, which you must walk the corridors of again and again.

Not to put to finer point on it, but extreme metal in all its forms would not be the same with out Celtic Frost: their riffs have been reborn in far too many band'ss works to mention. Their black and mournful experimentation with in the metalform is unsurpassed. Into The Pandemonium was released in 1987, and no-one was mixing orchestrationand dancebeats with metal at this point- Christ that was the days of big hair metal! So here we are with an new album, which reaffirms their relevance and offers the listener up new challenges and ways to perceive the metalform. The album throughout is heaving with multitude of shadows, the lyric content painting loss and despair in almost biblical terms. Heavy gloomy riffs crash into your head, Tom Gabriel's recognisable vocal tone never sounded better, as he voices/growls worldworn decline.

It’s difficult to pick favourite tracks, as it all fits together as one long grim sound poem. But some of my favourites are: The grimly gothic ‘Heavy as lead’ rifforama of Domain Of Decay, the track pumps with such hypnotic heavy air, it’s like being in a decaying and crumbling black tower, trying to exit before it disappears into dust. Totengott is knee deep in sinister air, pounding and echoed tones hover, breeding a heady dark air, Gabriel appears sounding demonlike, his voice creepily altered. The track then loops out into eerier backwards noise. It’s the first track of the triptych: three linked tracks. They really top off the album in epic bleak manner, each track twisted by crypt air dank riffs or creepy experimentations or a mixture of both. The album exits with breathtakingly sad string work, conjuring up visions of a battle field after a days' long battle. A truly awe inspiring album, one of the highlights of the metal genre in recent years. A 100% stone dark metal cold classic.