Bathory - Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987) Reviews
This is the album where Quorthon really hit his straps. The debut album, while being fairly raw, was pretty much the first real black metal album. The Return took things to an even dirtier, darker sound but I feel it lost out on the song writing side with much out it failing to hold my attention. But Under the Sign of the Black Mark turned everything up a notch.
The production is much better, the song writing has more variety and is much more memorable, and the level of aggression of tracks like Equimanthorn, Chariots of Fire and Of Doom... had simply not been reached before. Even the slower tracks such as Enter the Eternal Fire and 13 Candles are dripping with venom. Literally hundreds of black metal bands owe their existence to this period of Bathory's career.
I can't give it full marks as the album does have its flaws (Quorthon's leads still a bit dodgy, but at least they're short and sweet this time, and Bathory's finest moment is still yet to come.
More divine steers have been slaughtered sacrilegiously, but not ever like this…
He decapitates the bovine, wrings its blood, severs the withering vessels and excavates the flesh and any obstructing bones. He places the steer’s head upon his, raises his fists to the sky in triumph an holds a bone in his right hand and stomps and looks down on everyone else, showing that every album before it, whether thrash, death or even black metal is inferior to it.
Seriously this album is something fucking else. The songs are very assorted and there is a wide variety of riffs, speed, and the structure of those songs in many ways. They all use the same elements but is masterfully arranged in unique ways to give different tastes. For example, Massacre fucking will stab your ass to death immediately upon opening up the album. Chariots of Fire also uses a blazing fast pace, with the guitars sounding like an actual wildfire, or a buzzing flaming army of thousands of charioted hellish knights which fall upon Earth to destroy humanity by driving the destruction of a nuclear war. Equimanthorn at the beginning half is very quick, aggressive and almost war metal like. I mean it was a massive influence on war metal (with bands like Revenge covering it), but then turns into a very catchy, slow and crushing drum beat that match the rhythm of the guitar in a groovy way, but a groove only unique to black metal. Its a hellish groove, which is not happily catchy, but it makes you march in a coordinated mass towards the inferno of hate.
Enter the Eternal Fire is one of the greatest and most unique songs in metal, both in sound and thematic intention. It is consistently praised, and universally loved as a staple in black metal and in metal as a whole. But those aspects are not what I’m mentioning here. The uniqueness of the riff, which has literally no resemblance to any other metal song at all, because of the feedback loop of the entire riff biting itself back like a self eating snake. What I mean here is that the riff has a tie and varies a lot in pitch very quickly, between the sparsely laid out power chord posts and the unique one or two open string picking is what makes the song sound very unique, awesome, and hellish, and this is not even including the icy, raw, and serrated guitar tone. Its orchestral, an evil metal orchestra done right. Its like one of the perfect songs that should be playing during Dante’s journey in the Nine Circles in one of his Poems “Inferno”. The lyrics of the song sound like an in-depth tour of a man’s descent in Hell, and absolutely like some Satan worship of willingly giving up yourself to go to Hell in some cheesy corny song. In fact the Devil is never mentioned once in this song. The person in question in the song is being forced and hypnotized with the constant call of his name and is drawn into the fire, seeing and hearing the bodies and voices crying in pain. He will enter the eternally burning fire.
Call from the Grave is very heavy, like a cargo vessel, Jon Brower Minnoch, Sagittarius A heavy. Okay maybe not that heavy, but it is a very dark, warm, groovy and a shock mondo VHS film kind of atmosphere, like observing an autopsy. It has that magnetic, distorted ragged almost fluid like electronic bass sound when the strings on Quorthon’s guitar are rolling down each of the bars. The main riff of this song is such that it only sounds good in this, setting, atmosphere and album. The guitar sound is unlike any other and so is the song’s riffs. The lyrics also are quite haunting, considering the fact that the mastermind of this masterpiece is gone.
I mean this is the greatest black metal album ever. Forget about the overrated “Storm of the Light’s Bane”, “Filosofem” and absolutely abysmally garbage “black shoe gaze” albums that you’ll for some reason find on that stupid black metal ranking list in “Rate Your Music”, (which is an absolute garbage joke of a website). But besides that, I think that this album is important to not just black metal, but metal as a whole. This album destroys any other band in the 80s, and it is the greatest example of what an evil sounding album should sound like. Its primordial, cold and hot on the extremes, fast, brutal, aggressive and malicious. This is a perfect album, anybody would be shitheaded pillock to not consider this a flawless record of extreme music. It is not rooted in any previous genres because it created a new sound entirely, with some little footing in thrash metal, but it is breaks from that as a whole. I mean enough has been said here, I personally love this album and have it on a CD, so its playable in the car stereo, this album is addicting truly!
Clan Challenge 3/25.
The challenge here is to try to say something that hasn't already been said. Let me first get my old man rant out of the way:
A lot of youngsters these days mistakenly believe that Mayhem were the founders of Black Metal, and that Euronymous pioneered the genre. This is false. Mayhem found the second wave of black metal. This is the true origin of Black Metal. I love Venom to death but despite the name of the song and album they were playing evil-thrash. Fuckin' love Venom though.
/end rant.
This really is the blueprint. This is the standard by which all black metal is compared to for me. It's uncompromizingly raw, nasty, evil, and relentless, but it has something else going for it that a lot of immitators are missing. This thing has a heart and soul. Quarthon is actually an amazing poet, he uses satanic and norse pagan imagery but he does it so much more elegantly than everybody else. He's kind of analogous to Chuck Schuldiner for me, an extreme metal founder that would become rapidly more progressive with each release. Quarthon was ahead of the game in 1987, and he's still ahead of most of today's artists.
More than just nasty noise, these songs have memorable individual parts, riffs, and structures. That guitar tone is also really unique it sounds like a buzzsaw, and that description gets used a lot when describing metal, but I think in this album it really does sound like one, and I think the cliche' probably arose from people attempting to describe this album. The production here is raw, but it does have a little bit, as opposed to other raw/DIY black metal where they just threw a tape recorder in the middle of the room. There was effort here, because as raw as it is-you can hear everything pretty clear. That is not easy to achieve and it is not an accident.
There you have it, the blackest of the black, the coldest of the cold, the satan-est of the satan, the pagan-est of the pagan. The Black Flame of Black Metal's Eternal Fire! BATHORY-UNDER THE SIGN OF THE BLACK MARK from 1987.
I actually use this album as one of many black metal albums that help drown out sound when doing... believe it or not... goat farming chores. A couple of screams from specific goats give me headaches, but black metal, for whatever reason, does not. Maybe because I'm use to it? Anyway, I've heard this album a few times by this point, and I have to say, I was totally overrating it when I first heard it and gave it a 91/100, but it's still not bad at all. Many of the songs share ideas, but they also go quickly enough to justify their short length. Everything is very catchy while still feeling a little undercooked, as Quorthon still had a little growing to do before his magnificent masterwork, Blood Fire Death. This one's more punkish, standard thrash and simplistic, but self-aware for the most part, and highly catchy. As well, even longer songs like ENter the Eternal Fire, landing just below the 7-minute mark, manage to justify the length with a properly epic slow pace and some wonderful rhythmic riffage. In fact, the major riffs of the album are probably the stronges points. But some songs, notably Massacre and Equimanthorn, share some very similar ideas. So while this album isn't the most origjnal of Bathory's works, it's quite a bit of fun and its quickness gives it good replay value.
84
Bathory is back at it with perhaps their strongest album yet. The production is just a bit better and the musicianship is just a bit tighter. The songwriting has more variation but still retains the signature evil, distant atmosphere at all times. Other than that, it’s just classic Bathory, plain and simple.
Aggressively Flawed Perfection
If I had to pick one album that defines early Black Metal for me, Under the Sign of the Black Mark would be the one. There are absolutely better Black Metal albums than this, even in Bathory's own discography, but the furious lo-fi aggressiveness sucks me back in every single time. The rawness and speed of the riffs and Quorthon's ragged but somehow endearing voice creates the perfect representation of what classic Black Metal was and how it should be done even to this day.
Bathory are the masters of lo-fi and it especially shows on this album. While the mix and production is dirty and almost amateurish at times with clipping and imperfections coming through, their style of playing and overall tone of all the instruments makes these imperfections just part of the performance. Every time I come back to this album I'm instantly reminded of how bad it initially sounds, but as I sit through "Massacre" and "Woman of Dark Desires" I realign my production expectations and always think that this just sounds precisely what classic Black Metal should sound like. "Enter the Eternal Flames" is easily the highlight, with a massive Black Metal chug riff that never gets old for me.
Blood Fire Death would be the pivot point for Bathory's career, and I very much prefer that album to Under the Sign of the Black Mark, but this album just has such an evil character about it that isn't completely overshadowed by Bathory's other two monumental releases.