Earworm Analysis: Celtic Frost

To get you ready for my upcoming novel- Heavy Metal Scientology Aliens- let's take a fun and educational trip through the music of Celtic Frost, since they're prominently featured on the book's soundtrack. 

Think of this as a totally subjective, much-more-fun Wikipedia page on the band. Once you've read this, you'll fully appreciate how I used them in my book.

These Swiss troublemakers started as the band Hellhammer in 1981 and were widely credited with inventing the black metal genre. ROAR!

Innovative and zippy, but they sucked and they knew it. So they disbanded and learned how to play their instruments.

A year or so later, they re-emerged from their cocoon as Celtic Frost. Avant-garde, proto-death/black metal, also a legit thrash/speed metal band, with some doom metal and operatic flavoring. And they looked like this:

Much calmer, looks like. And they sounded like this. (Just listen to the first few minutes if you like, you'll get the idea.)

After two albums of that, they got bored and did a really off-the-wall experimental metal album that had some traditional-sounding Frost tunes...along with a cover of "Mexican Radio" and stuff like this.

Frost's GAF quotient: zero. They took great delight in confusing and alienating metalhead fans.

Which led to the band admittedly losing their bearings and selling out HARD by dropping a glam metal turd in 1988: Cold Lake. It had song titles like "Dance Sleazy" and "Seduce Me Tonight" aaaaand "CHERRY ORCHARDS"! 

Also they looked like this:

Sheesh. And ouch.

Irony: most of that album was fairly solid mainstream heavy metal, just with an awful production job and pathetic lyrics.

Frost took some time off and then dropped a fairly legit thrash album which was kinda my favorite album of theirs- Vanity/Nemesis. No one else liked it, though. Fans were still too offended over Frost's previous sellout album to give it a fair chance. It had stuff like this.

Celtic Frost disappeared after that and then dropped a new album 15 years later from out of nowhere, hitting us with some full-on nightmarish doom metal. (Bonus: the singer sounds like Danzig at the start there.) And they looked "normal" again:

So they've been all over the map. The lead singer has another band now, Triptykon. I've heard some of their stuff and it's decent doom/thrash.

And as a footnote, here's a bonus bit of madness for you.

Yes, that is real. Apparently Celtic Frost made a 2002 demo album called Prototype that never got released. And you can guess why after hearing that there song. The Internet dredges up all the sludge. There is nothing you can hide from it.

So now you’re fully informed on the fascinating career of this innovative, amazing, all-over-the-place band.

And now in closing I’ll admit that I just use them as a joke in my book. My main character in there only likes Celtic Frost's cheesy glam sellout album. But YOU are now in on that joke, since you know how complex and nuanced the band really is! Go, you! 


-Phony McFakename

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