Review by Shawn Wiggins for Bathory - Under the Sign of the Black Mark (1987)

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!