Celtic Frost - "Monotheist", 2006

In retrospect, the hype surrounding Celtic Frost's reunion was a bittersweet moment. In a way, it was great to finally see the talents and the legacy of the band and its creative duo of Fischer/Ain getting the global recognition they deserved back in the 80s, especially after the release of the misunderstood classic "Into the Pandemonium"; on the other hand, "Monotheist" introduced the band to a whole new generation of fans, but - in my humble opinion - it wasn't the masterpiece a lot of the press and new listeners wanted everybody to believe. It's a quite understandable reaction, though, and pretty common too in similar situations; most of us tend to hold dear the albums they grew up with, the ones that were current when we started listening to a certain band, and it was probably the same for the generation who discovered Frost with this record. Additionally, due to its heavier than thou, brooding nature, the album also catered to the whole doom/post-metal scene that was flourishing in the first decade of the 2000s, opening new possibilities for the band. As we all know, the Celtic Frost reunion didn't last long, though, with internal turmoil cutting short its newfound success, but "Monotheist" still served as a launching pad for Tom Warrior's Tryptikon, which pretty much followed in its footsteps stylistically.

"Monotheist" isn't necessarily a bad record, but it's nothing surprising either. While "Into the Pandemonium" was a groundbreaking, brave record for 1987 standards, the 2006 album didn't really challenge what was going on in the metal scene at the time; after all, it was written by musicians who were already well in their mid-40s, and it often sounds like a mishmash of stuff that younger bands had already perfected during the 90s or early 2000s, from the low-tuned guitars to the ultra-doom passages, but also the slight electro/dark-wave touches or the more upfront black metal elements in lyrics and image (or those screams on "Totengott"). There's nothing really forward-thinking or thought-provoking on "Monotheist", but to be fair, by 2006 there wasn't much space left for innovation within metal; considering what the expectations for the album were, though, at least by listening to the alarming 2002 "Prototype" demo, it's safe to say everybody heaved a sigh of relief when it actually turned out to be a heavy record, instead of another "Cold Lake" debacle, or worse. It felt more as if the band was rightfully claiming back something it contributed to creating back in the day, trying to finally reap what it sowed in the 80s, instead of opening new paths for metal as it once used to do.

"Progeny" is, honestly, a disappointing album opener; the first riff sounds like a detuned version of Motörhead's "Orgasmatron", and most of the song is made up of single-string, simplistic riffs and a few power chords, with new drummer Franco Sesa trying to keep things varied by adding layers of double kick and faster arrangements that don't sound like Celtic Frost at all. The only familiar thing is Tom Warrior's gruff vocals, while the bombastic production by Peter Tägtgren sounds certainly huge, but at the same time contrived and too polished, not unlike some of today's products that get churned out the whole time by Napalm Records or Nuclear Blast. To its merit, it still sounds current, but given the premise, I wouldn't consider it much of a compliment. The low-tuned, two-note approach of the song unfortunately seems to be a leitmotif for most of the record, and it's not too far-fetched when some people compared the riffing to Sepultura's "Roots" or, even worse, to nu-metal; that's pretty much the same concept, to strip things down to the max and to build the songs around the essentials, with all the emphasis on the heaviness of the sound. If you want to consider that a positive thing, then you can certainly appreciate the songs more, but while Celtic Frost has never been an overly complicated band, that's not what I expected from it when I first listened to "Monotheist", as it barely sounded like the band I used to love.

While some of the material just sounds rather bland, the minimalistic approach luckily works better on some of the songs, such as the very heavy "Os Abysmi vel Daath" or "Domain of Decay"; the latter features a main riff that sounds exactly like one would expect Celtic Frost to sound, but it speaks volumes that the same riff was actually written during some demo sessions the band held around '92/'93, for a song originally titled "Pearl of Love". "Synagoga Satanae" is probably the best song of the lot, a doom opus with some unsettling atmospheres that sounds like a modern take on Cathedral's "Forest of Equilibrium", although Cathedral itself (or With the Dead, for that matter) actually released heavier material than that throughout the 2000s. 

And here we come to one of the main points of this review: if you read other reviews or a lot of people's comments about this record, the only thing they all seem to be able to say is that "Monotheist" is "the heaviest, darkest album ever" and other stuff along those lines. Besides the fact that it is obviously not true, since there have been plenty of more extreme, crushing doom records before and after it, not to mention darker ones, it reveals how monodimensional the album is; there simply isn't much else to say about it, and a couple of moodier tracks, such as the dark-wave detour of "Drown in Ashes" or the gothic-tinged "Obscured" (curiously, a reworked version of the "November" song from the infamous "Prototype" demo), end up being the most interesting, since they're actually different from the rest and a tad more creative. If you'd strip "Monotheist" of the bombastic production and the low tuning, there wouldn't be much left, if not the skeletal structure of some rather average songs; it's all style and not much substance.

It seems to me that there was some sort of "Hollywood ending"-syndrome attached to Celtic Frost's reunion; you know, the underdogs from a small European country who did three legendary records, fell from grace ("Cold Lake"), and then came back through many hardships to reclaim their rightful throne with "Monotheist", headlining Wacken festival in a blaze of glory. Cool, right? I actually saw the band live on its 2007 european tour; all the classic 80s material was slowed down and detuned to sound more in line with "Monotheist", and I was sorely disappointed. I was baffled back then already, definitely not feeling like I was living a legendary moment or anything like that. 

Celtic Frost was already legendary before its reunion, and if it didn't release any other records after "Into the Pandemonium", its status would be the same, if not better. "Cold Lake" was a stain on the band's legacy, but the band already made amends for that with the solid "Vanity / Nemesis", so we didn't really need a reunion to write a better ending to the story, or anything like that. In retrospect, even some of the material included on those long-forgotten 1991, '92 and '93 demo sessions - or the three unreleased songs on the "Parched with Thirst Am I and Dying" compilation - were actually more Celtic Frost-sounding than what ended up on "Monotheist" many years later, and a more natural progression of the band's sound in a way, while not necessarily that much better. 

All things considered, I don't dislike "Monotheist" as much as it might come off from this review, and listening back to it, it flows surprisingly well for such a dense, sludgy record; it's groovy, menacing, and there are glimpses of the greatness that was, but I could have lived without it, and - above all - it didn't bring anything new to the table, as opposed to what the band did in the 80s. That's probably the biggest gripe when talking about a once creative force such as Celtic Frost, and if I had to choose between this and "Vanity / Nemesis" as a last album by the band, I'd still take the latter.