Review by ZeroSymbolic7188 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.