Review by Rexorcist for Celtic Frost - To Mega Therion (1985)

Celtic Frost has one of the weirdest histories I've ever seen for a metal band.  They have a couple of highly regarded thrash albums, go experimental for an album, turn into a GLAM METAL band and epically fail, go back to thrash and fail again, have a long hiatus, turn into a doom metal band with a big comeback for one album, and then break up.  As you can see, it was quite hard for me to take a band like that seriously for quite a while.  When I finally gave them a spin, I stopped after the second album and to this day I haven't heard anything past that.  The second album, btw, is To Mega Therion.

This album is so heavy and evil that it's frightening that mankind can do this.  You can practically feel the Venom influence grabbing you from behind.  Between the soeedy and surreal stuff, the vile blackened thrash and the occasional epic and cheesy horn-infused doom, there's a constant presence of mankind's absurd villainry that proves something about the band: that creepy-ass album cover means something.  You know, the one that looks like Tim Burton had babies with the gargoyles in Count Olaf's mansion?  But the coolest thing about this piece of work is the ability to take the evil and apply it to the JAM factor without even trying.  Obviously, these guys had a rare form of talent back in the early days.  This is a classic and a rare breed of thrash.