Tom G. Warrior interview and thoughts

[qcrisp]

Recently, I've been listening a great deal to the Triptykon album Eparistera Daimones - pretty much playing it back-to-back. I looked up a documentary on Celtic Frost (Tom G. Warrior's more famous musical vehicle), and found it a bit cringey, but I found this interview, which I really enjoyed:

YouTube

At one point he makes the Black Sabbath connection explicit - that is, that he learned to write riffs by copying Tony Iommi. I have to say, I've always enjoyed Celtic Frost more than Black Sabbath, however, and though Tom G. denigrates his own musical ability in this interview, I think he is also right in saying that he has something unusual as a musician. In a sense, the idea of distorted electric guitar is taken to a conclusion with Celtic Frost, and some of Tom G.'s other projects, since he creates a sound in which the original instrument can be forgotten, and what you have, instead, is just a primal, chthonic pulsation, like a huge, undulating serpent.

I find I am more apt to see things when I close my eyes listening to his music than I am when listening to other heavy metal. Of course, H.R. Giger has provided cover art a few times for Tom G., and the things I see tend to be in a Gigeresque vein.

I've never been much of a completist, but I think I might move in that direction with Tom G.'s back catalogue.

[MadsPLP]

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

Recently, I've been listening a great deal to the Triptykon album Eparistera Daimones - pretty much playing it back-to-back.

It's a masterpiece. One of the few groundbreaking new metal releases in years. How many musicians can still make something so relevant, so fresh,
so alive over 30 years into their career? The only other ones that spring to mind is Current 93 and Scott Walker (that doesn't mean that there aren't any others, just that I'm ignorant).

Quote

At one point he makes the Black Sabbath connection explicit - that is, that he learned to write riffs by copying Tony Iommi. I have to say, I've always enjoyed Celtic Frost more than Black Sabbath, however, and though Tom G. denigrates his own musical ability in this interview, I think he is also right in saying that he has something unusual as a musician. In a sense, the idea of distorted electric guitar is taken to a conclusion with Celtic Frost, and some of Tom G.'s other projects, since he creates a sound in which the original instrument can be forgotten, and what you have, instead, is just a primal, chthonic pulsation, like a huge, undulating serpent.

Much as I love Sabbath, I agree that Warrior's guitar playing seems like the conclusion, and end-point. I'm in the process of moving and have been listening a lot to Mercyful Fate and Celtic Frost, those two giants that stand above the rest of the metal made in the 80's (since Judas Priest peaked in the 70's anyway), and even comparing them, Celtic Frost is, well, quite something else, something much darker (which isn't to spite Mercyful Fate, one of my favourite bands).

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I've never been much of a completist, but I think I might move in that direction with Tom G.'s back catalogue.

I would wait with buying Cold Lake and the Apollyon Sun releases. They're not really worth it, though Cold Lake is amusing. The rest of Celtic Frost, Triptykon, and Hellhammer is mandatory. Seriously. Warrior himself thought Hellhammer rather crude, but even then, one can hear that this is something else entirely.

In his brilliant memoir of Hellhammer and early Celtic Frost - such a devastating book - Only Death is Real, he describes how they brought a ghettoblaster to some sort of meet'n'greet or press conference with Venom, then playing Hellhammer for a bunch of people who didn't get it at all. Once again: something else entirely. (I love Venom, but that's a different story.)

[qcrisp]

I think the next album I buy might be Monotheist.

I remember distinctly how excited I was when I bought Into the Pandemonium - gatefold vinyl. There aren't so many albums where I actually remember purchasing it, but this is one of them. (Lionheart by Kate Bush is another.) I saw CF live once - at the Ritzy in Cardiff, supported by Kreator and someone else.

I did buy Cold Lake when it first came out. I really wanted to like it, and I wasn't against it just because it was a change of image, but I couldn't quite get into it. What I heard of Vanity/Nemesis after that didn't appeal much to me, but after Cold Lake perhaps I wasn't giving it a fair listen. Anyway, Triptykon has very much re-ignited my interest in all that pertains to Tom G.

[Hideous Name]

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

I think the next album I buy might be Monotheist.

I remember when this album came out many people didn't like it for their gothic metal influences, but it's a very solid album and one of my favorites albums in the Celtic Frost catalogue.

[Draugen]

Eparistera Daimones, Melana Chasmata, Monotheist are all albums I listen to repeatedly. Bordering on obsessively. There is something in the tone of the guitars and the production.. literally the second I stop listening I want to hear it again. He is a genius. I got to see Triptykon live a couple of times and they more than captured that.

I don't listen to the older albums quite as often, but this was very much part of my childhood:

YouTube

[qcrisp]

Quote Originally Posted by Draugen

I don't listen to the older albums quite as often, but this was very much part of my childhood: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sjhUA1A-A9w

Yes, a real blast from the past, that. The clips that stick out from that trailer montage for me are the Project A-ko ones. Without that sudden influx of 'manga' (it was anime, but we called it 'manga') into Britain back in the... late eighties/early nineties, I suppose it was, I might never have discovered Mishima and a lot more besides and my life would have been very different today. Funny how these things happen.

[Robert Adam Gilmour]

I've only got the first 3 Celtic Frost albums so far. So glad I bought Into The Pandemonium because that's when it really clicked for me. Previously I just liked a few songs on Morbid Tales and To Mega Therion but it felt more like a sort of music history obligation at that point.
Warrior's voice along with the female vocalists is such a mesmerizing combination.

[MadsPLP]

Quote Originally Posted by qcrisp

I did buy Cold Lake when it first came out. I really wanted to like it, and I wasn't against it just because it was a change of image, but I couldn't quite get into it. What I heard of Vanity/Nemesis after that didn't appeal much to me, but after Cold Lake perhaps I wasn't giving it a fair listen. Anyway, Triptykon has very much re-ignited my interest in all that pertains to Tom G.

Vanity/Nemesis sounds a bit tired, especially compared to what came before. Like they're trying to live up to expectations. I'm still pondering what could have been, had they not made Cold Lake, but instead followed the path Into the Pandemonium took them down.

Monotheist is hugely underrated.

Because of being of relatively young age, I've never been able to se CF live, not even on their reunion tour. I did watch Triptykon at the Copenhell festival last year. Stellar band, but the sound was caught by the wind; a recurring problem at that particular festival. I hope to see them at an indoors venue at some time. The material deserves it.

I think that To Mega Therion is my favourite, but the first three, Monotheist, the two Triptykon albums and everything Hellhammer released including demos are classics in my book.

[xylokopos]

I started listening to metal circa 1990 and I recall coming to Celtic Frost in a roundabout way: I had purchased a death metal album by Obituary that had a cover of Circle of the Tyrants that ignited my interest. In an entirely predictable way - afflicted by the folly of youth and all that - I did not appreciate the original that much when I first heard it, though I do recall being stunned by the Giger cover of the album. In all honesty, I do not remember if I ever purchased or had a copy made of To Mega Therion, even after I became more familar with both Celtic Frost and Giger imagery. Needless to say, though I started working my way backwards through certain discographies I never really listened to the earlier Hellhammer stuff until much, much later.

Anyway, it was fantastic to listen to Eparistera Daimones and see what Tom G. is doing these days and I am very thankful for this thread and the recommendation. I feel strangely shameful that I get acquainted or reacquainted with this stort of thing in a non-linear way. To give you an example, I listened to Hellhammer again after twenty or so years after watching or reading something about the seminal impact of certain bands in the Norwegian black metal scene and in the evolution of extreme forms of metal in general.

Tom G., Quorthon, King Diamond...if metal had ever gained the widespread acceptance and had enjoyed the audience of other popular forms of music, we would hear these artists being spoken of in similar terms to Elvis or Johnny Cash.

[Perhaps tangential to this, but Tom G. has been interviewed for the last Giger documentary that just got released. Also in that documentary, Stanislav Grof. He has written absolutely mind-blowing stuff about Giger's art from a psychoanalytical perspective].

[qcrisp]

My first Celtic Frost purchase must have been the Tragic Serenades picture disc. This was in the days when, for something like the hinterland of heavy metal (in which CF existed), unless your friends had a copy of the album, you wouldn't be able to hear the music before purchasing. You had to rely on reviews, instinct and so on.

I remember reading a review of To Mega Therion in Kerrang. It had three and three quarter stars (out of five). The reviewer described it as 'art metal'. I remember phrases from the review such as, "an army of whistling zombies marching through hell". Anyway, despite the less than ecstatic three-and-three-quarters-out-of-five, something about the whole thing intrigued me greatly. There was the grainy, black-and-white photograph of Tom G. Warrior, for one thing, looking like some barbarian chieftan on a throne of baroque otherworldliness (you could only see his face, but that's what it brought to mind). Also, though heavy metal bands often like to conjure preposterously with language, I sensed some rare felicity in this conjuring in the case of the band in question. The very name - Celtic Frost - had a ring of uniqueness and inevitability about it.

Anyway, when I received my picture disc of Tragic Serenades (not sure why I went for this one first), from a specialist shop, in the post, after the initial excitement, playing it, I was disappointed to find it was not as 'arty' as I had imagined, but mainly extremely heavy and dissonant.

Having invested so much in the band in my imagination, however (and financially, having sent off for the record), I didn't easily give up, and kept playing the record until I got it. The proof that I got it - apart from anything else - is that I am still listening to the band about thirty years later.

Some time later - a year or two, perhaps more - when I also had Into the Pandemonium and To Mega Therion, I remember that, amongst the many disparaging comments about Celtic Frost in Kerrang, there was one by a journalist reviewing the debut album from Candlemass, Nightfall. The journalist wrote, "This is the album Celtic Frost could make if they had any brains." I found it an annoying comment, but, anyway, I was at the age when you look for 'more of what you like', so I bought a copy of Nightfall. It was one of my many revelations of the idiocy of 'other people'. It was a decent enough metal album, but the only thing it had in common with CF was some slow, doomy chords and imagery in the general area of the Gothic. I tried to relisten to Candlemass again recently and was bored within a few seconds. The journalist might have done better to write, "This is the album that Celtic Frost could make if they wanted to appease the taste for the anodyne and predictable in the music journalism fraternity."

I recall another comment in Kerrang: "The latest Celtic Frost album has polarised the Kerrang staff again, with Malcolm Dome thinking it's genius, and everyone else thinking it's ####."

Since then, my ability to stand with the Celtic Frosts and Malcolm Domes of the world (not the "everyone else") has been close to unerring.