Dogmatic

Holy Mother of God! Celtic Frost’s newly released ‘Monotheist’ has not only exceeded my expectations, it has completely blown me away and refused to leave my iPod and iTunes. On heavy rotation, it permeates the office and home airwaves as I will not play anything else but this fucker! I had thought Celtic Frost all but dead - their glory days buried deep and far away somewhere in the mid to late 80’s. Even though the band’s origins spawned out of the (awful!) Hellhammer back in 1984 (they were so bad back then you just had to take notice!) they reformed as Celtic Frost and released the wonderful ‘Morbid Tales’.

With the rest of the metalsphere trying to mimic the fledgling Metallica and trying to play at ridiculously fast speeds, Celtic Frost took a different approach. Haunting, catchy Sabbath-esque riffs filled their repertoire. Always experimental and even operatic in places, infinitely evil and sinister, the Frost were a unique and cathartic band that were busy creating a sound uniquely their own. No one sounded like them. No one had the balls to pull off such an album as the gloom-ridden opus ‘Into The Pandemonium’. Which other Metal band would even attempt a cover of Wall of Voodoo’s ‘Mexican Radio’ and do it so magnificently? And here we are, years later - Celtic Frost have returned with quite possibly one of the finest releases for 2006. I can’t even begin to put into words just how good this album is. Innovative. Fresh. Atmospheric. Brutal. In this Metalcore (ugh!) world we currently live in where every band tries to out-muscle every other band by screaming and growling like a carbon-copy of eachother, it is refreshing, so refreshing that a band like Celtic Frost are back with an album so sinister, so macabrely evil that they are going to take the Metal world by the scruff of its collective neck and send it to hell!