For a little change of pace I am going to post a double record review I have written for a magazine called The Drama. It will be broken down into three parts /spread over a span of three days, not because it is all that long but because the publication deserves first dibs at running the piece in full.
In case you have never seen this magazine, their record reviews feature a battle of the record and each writer chooses two albums to review against one another (one new release –v- an old or new release). For this particular round I have chosen two new records.
Celtic Frost's Monotheist –verse- Scott Walker's The Drift.
I hardly ever post non Pitchfork related writing these days (or ever come to think of it) so I hope this is a nice little switch up and don’t worry, our normal PFM re-reviews will be posted this week too. In fact one should be posted in a few hours.
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Oh metal. Where did we lose you? When did you become a façade of evil, a contest of corpse paint and whose leather arm band carries the most nails? You were scary once, a kind of sonic blast never heard before and instilling a terror in people matched only by a cat’s fear of a running vacuum.
It is as if metal crumbled under the pressure of popularity and wide acceptance; losing its power to shock and awe along the way. With metal sections cropping up in chain stores across the world and features on MTV celebrating its head banging ways, metal in the modern world has become a comercial cartoon of itself, a fashion statement rather than a way of life for the macabre at heart.
The threat of unspeakable terror has vanished in this world of death, doom, and double kick drums but for those kill-seeking types a new horror has been unleashed by Scott Walker while Celtic Frost has opted to travel a path in metal so well traveled it would only be fair to now call it a highway.
