Only Death Is Real

Few bands mean as much to me as Celtic Frost. Their aesthetic as much as their music struck a deep chord from the very beginning - the atmosphere of barbaric splendour running through the lyrics, the riffs, the helmets and the eyeliner. To Mega Therion is in my view the closest metal ever got to realising the Wagnerian ideal of the Gesamptkunstwerk - a perfect synthesis of music, design and artistic vision. In this record is everything I want to achieve for my own music - breathtaking sweeps of epic immensity, searing golden highs and pitch-black frozen lows. When I am lost and mazed I can play this record and look out over empires and continents. Here is everything, all Innocence and Wrath.

Only Death Is Real: an illustrated history of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost by Tom Gabriel Fischer with Martin Eric Ain will be published in November 2009 by Bazillion Points.

www.bazillionpoints.com

8.5

I never read Terrorizer these days, except when I get a mention of course. Many thanks to Avi Pitchon for this review from #185, July 2009.

TENHORNEDBEAST "My Horns Are A Flame To Draw Down The Truth". Cold Spring

Less a straight forward remix of 2007's "The Sacred Truth", this "companion" is suspended between re-working and re-recording existing tracks, plus a re-visiting and elaboration on sounds recorded for "The Sacred Truth" but not used. "Fenris-Wolf" reworks 2007's "In The Teeth Of The Wolf". The droning gongs of opener "Ruins Son" are a motif derived from "Christus Nox" that closed "The Sacred Truth". Nevertheless, a novice to TenHornedBeast's work is welcome to delve into this epos of ritual dark ambient as a release in its own right. Its barren minimalism is misleading, as further listens unravel extra layers of ominous, paralysing, pulsating spectral sounds that can be likened to a pitch black, empty, uncharted, enormous cavern whispering the hollow, sinister echoes of long forgotten gatherings of an uncanny occult nature. The space seems uninhabited, yet an abstract presence gradually increases to finally manifest in a deathly, rhythmic, rumbling procession. [8.5]