I never had a chance to sound off about last week's Celtic Frost reunion tour stop at B.B. King's on Thursday night...and wasn't sure how much I ought to say, anyway, given that thanks to a miscommunication, I only caught roughly the last half of the show. Thankfully, pretty much everything I might have wanted to say has been covered by my pal Elisabeth Vincentelli -- Time Out New York arts czar, and the most broadly cultured person I know -- over on her blog, The Determined Dilettante. Her post-concert wrap-up is vivid and detailed, and includes coverage of opening act 1349, which I missed altogether.
The fact that Celtic Frost, one of the most influential bands in modern metal, is back at all is fairly amazing. That the rejuvenated group also managed to issue one of the year's strongest metal releases, Monotheist (on Century Media), is nothing short of astonishing. The disc kicked my head in the very first time I heard it, and I'm still finding new things in it with every spin. It's less ornate and experimental than the quirky masterpieces of the band's late-'80s heyday (To Mega Therion and Into the Pandemonium), but it's unquestionably worthy of sitting beside those hallowed discs.
Monotheist presented a new sound for Celtic Frost: a massively downtuned, lurching grind, bleak and desolate. But what I wasn't prepared for when I entered the club was the physical force of that sound: It wasn't overbearingly loud by any means, but it was dense, and hit you somewhere squarely in the sternum. Elisabeth is quite right when she says that the currently in-vogue low-end posse on the Southern Lord label -- Sunn O))), Boris and the like, all of whom I admire -- has nothing on Celtic Frost circa-now. And I love the way that "Ground," the titanic dirge that serves as the album's defining moment, put her in mind of Hannibal crossing the Alps!
The ponderous disc-closer, "Synagoga Satanae," was somehow even more impressive live than it had been on CD. And more adventurous, as well -- there was actually a stretch in which the guitars completely escaped their "guitar"-ness, coughing up instead a grey buzz of between-the-channels static the likes of which you rarely hear outside the rarefied domain of electro-acoustic improv -- only here, you could headbang to it without embarassment. (Which, y'know, I did.)
Stepping back a minute, I interviewed the band's two protagonists, guitarist-vocalist Thomas Gabriel Fischer (formerly Tom G. Warrior) and bassist Martin Eric Ain, back in late spring, for a piece that ran in TONY when Monotheist was released. Both were erudite and forthcoming; otherwise, their characters couldn't have been more different. Ain sprawled on an armchair next to me in a small East Side apartment rented for a few days of press, sleep-rumpled and crunching breakfast cereal. Relaxed and easygoing, he spoke freely and at length about his political and spiritual beliefs, all of which filtered into the album (and none of which ended up in my piece).
Fischer, on the other hand, was tightly wound to an extent I'd never witnessed: what you see in the photo above is essentially what faced me across a coffee table, minus the kohl, and many of the entries on his blog confirm that this is no put-on for the press. A favorite entry, which Elisabeth also quoted, refers to the then-upcoming American dates:
Finally we will be able again to convey the dusk of our musical processions to the masses that have been deprived of sufficient morbidity for so long. They shall never forget.
Polite but intense, Fischer answered questions in clipped, exacting phrases; more than once his response was prefaced by the suggestion that the question could have been better phrased in some other way. He doesn't dispute the fact that this once-mighty band lost its way perilously during a brief, ill-advised glam phase at the end of the '80s, and he's clearly on his guard. (There was, in fact, one light moment, when Fischer paused mid-phrase to make sure his eyeliner wasn't trapped in the bathroom when the label publicist stepped in to take a quick shower.) Still, to see this important and influential band receiving its due once more is a thrill I'm glad I'm around to witness.
Celtic Frost hits Chicago on Saturday night, and Time Out Chicago music editor Antonia Simigis (who doesn't get to update Aural Fixations nearly as often as we'd like) has set the stage with a terrific article on the band -- she captures the voices of Fischer and Ain precisely as I remember them, but covers some altogether different topical terrain. Horns up!
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While I'm handing out accolades to my Time Out colleagues -- and really, I do feel blessed to be interacting daily with this bunch -- I'll direct you to coverage of a major event that pretty much slipped under the radar in the New York City media, since it took place way out in the wilderness of Montclair, New Jersey, under the aegis of the often stunningly adventurous Peak Performances series at Montclair State University. TONY theater editor David Cote has blogged a valuable report on The Difficulty of Crossing a Field, a new multimedia opera by Bang on a Can composer David Lang and librettist Mac Wellman, produced by Bob McGrath's Ridge Theater with video projections by Laurie Olinder and film by Bill Morrison. I was sorry to have missed this production, and I'm even sorrier now -- although, as David notes, a fuller production in New York City certainly seems likely. Nicely done.
Playlist:
Tangerine Dream - Essential (Caroline)
Isis - In the Absence of Truth (Ipecac; out Oct. 31), Clearing the Eye (Ipecac DVD; out Sept. 26) and Celestial (Escape Artist)
Mikel Rouse - The End of Cinematics (DVD-R demo)
Richard Wagner - Tristan und Isolde - Christine Brewer, Dagmar Peckova, John Treleaven, Boaz Daniel, Peter Rose, Apollo Voices, BBC Symphony Orchestra / Donald Runnicles (Warner Classics)
Christian Wolff - Ten Exercises (New World)
Keith Rowe and Toshimaru Nakamura - between (Erstwhile)
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