Danse Macabre

Product Information

Looking back, it’s tempting to see the Hellhammer of Spring 1984 as dogs who have just had their first beating. It’s a shame to get the repeated tracks, but it does allow the listener to compare songs more closely and get a feel for the way the band were working on their sound.

It’s a decent little entry in their catalogue, but the first major highlight was to come only months later. And I submitted a list of titles that I thought would be appropriate, and I really was also curious to hear what they had to say from outside of the band. Despite, or maybe because of, constant turmoil on so many fronts, Celtic Frost achieved an artistic level few others would even have dared to dream of aspiring towards. I bought this expecting some thing new but apart from the nice packaging box patch booklet and badge. Daring, dark and superlatively heavy, “To Mega Therion” is a sophisticated expression of CELTIC FROST‘s inherent drive to eschew genre limitations and, instead, define art on their own terms.As with the other released on here, this is the original version of the album / EP and not the expanded version. NET uses the Facebook Comments plugin to let people comment on content on the site using their Facebook account. Of course, if you look at the decade dispassionately now with the benefit of hindsight, you can see clearly that the true epitome of modernism in new music was happening in heavy metal, hidden in plain sight. Interestingly it features two songs which were already on Morbid Tales, at least on the US version included in this package. That the teenagers who recorded “The Third Of The Storm” and “Triumph Of Death” for the HELLHAMMER EP would, despite constant turmoil, be recording the jaw-dropping “Rex Irae” just three years later is astonishing.

From the furious opening riff of "Into The Crypts Of Rays" through to the avant-garde experimentation of "Danse Macabre", "Morbid Tales" heralded the arrival of CELTIC FROST as a profoundly unique and uncompromising band. The closest I’ve come to them is seeing Triptykon live a few years ago, which is essentially seeing one member playing in a different band. The release encompasses Celtic Frost’s early material from 1984 to 1987 and includes the band’s classic albums alongside a handful of rarities and goodies. Also included is a double-sided A2 poster, a ‘Necromaniac Union’ fan club enamel badge, a Danse Macabre sew-on woven patch, and a ‘Heptagram’ figurine USB drive containing MP3 audio of all the albums, including bonus tracks (vinyl release only).So there’s so many aspects involved with this, that when you go on stage with this music, this is always on my mind, this entire history. NWOBHM, as is pointed out in Michael Hann’s excellent book Denim And Leather, may well have been a movement rather than a specific sound, but it was something that happened all over the UK at grassroots level. Broadly speaking a thrash band with elements of other fledgling genres, they weren’t afraid to be a little experimental. The Tragic Serenades EP was both a chance to bring Martin Ain back into the fold and to improve on what they felt was a lacklustre production job by re-recording three To Mega Therion tracks.

The sobering process of recording Apocalyptic Raids for Noise Records in 1984 and realising that their intense love for extremity and teenage/young 20-something tunnel vision wasn’t going to be something they could transfer to record without a fundamental overhaul of values led them to a move that very few young bands have the nous for. That was actually one of the first things that BMG asked me when they hired me to do the concept and to do the art direction for this box set. I'd have liked them to put the files on the stick as individual releases, so instead of the Grave Hill Bunker Rehearsals being bonus tracks on Morbid Tales, it would be a separate folder, just like the CD is separate in the CD version of this box set.

Celtic Frost would take a more commercial turn with 1988’s Cold Lake, but the recordings that came before it remain legendary. Dethroned Emperor” and “Morbid Tales” are surrounded by a handful of other material and it seems that the songs were recorded at different times. They didn’t just identify one new area to move into but were constantly and simultaneously breaking new ground in many different ways, innovating but very rarely consolidating, minting sounds and styles as they zipped past, like it was no problem to them at all. To prove this, the first track on their first official release is 41 seconds of what sounds like someone screaming in the distance. All the bonus tracks from the EPs are bonus tracks on the end of each album, I have checked mine and all tracks are there.

Refusing ever to do what was expected or demanded, the band constantly changed musical direction, always brought in surprising influences, and kept people guessing as to where they might venture next. We have written some of the musical sketches the past few years and we are scheduled to go into the studio in 2023 to record the new album. The reason why we played Hellhammer music in Celtic Frost at the time was because we had just formed the band and there wasn’t enough material to fill a full rehearsal. It’s not that there aren’t absolutely jaw-breaking riffs on here – there are – it’s just that the most convincing and memorable tracks are the likes of ‘Rex Irae (Requiem: Overture – Fourth Version)’ and ‘Oriental Masquerade’ which only bear a casual similarity to metal of the day, the jumping off point being very adventurous British post punk and the early releases of the 4AD label given a brutal and elegiac makeover. We just finished the last concert for this year with Triptykon, and the next few months we will dedicate to finalizing some of the music.The set encompasses their material from 1984 to 1987 and includes the band's classic albums alongside a handful of rarities and goodies, such as some releases back on vinyl for the first time in 30+ years. Obviously the songs present will appear on other releases, but this is the closest I think you’ll get to recordings of Celtic Frost playing “live” from back in the day.