Reviews list for Bathory - Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987)

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 satanist of the satan, the paganist of the pagan. The Black Flame of Black Metal's Eternal Fire! BATHORY-UNDER THE SIGN OF THE BLACK MARK from 1987.

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. 

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.