MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM (15)
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February 18, 2024
One in a series of 25 enthusiastic posts, contributed by 25 HILOBROW friends and regulars, on the topic of metal records from the Eighties (1984–1993, in our periodization schema). Series edited by Heather Quinlan. Also check out our MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM playlist at Spotify.
CELTIC FROST | “I WON’T DANCE (THE ELDERS’ ORIENT)” | 1987
Much marks the Swiss doom metal band Celtic Frost’s 1987 album, Into the Pandemonium, as strange. The record is a powerful assemblage of rock mysticism, all occult caterwauling, angular solos, battle-ready drums, and arrangement wizardry. It’s the sort of thing that, at proper volume, promises to tap into the very fabric of myth — or at least lend a climactic soundtrack to a weekend Dungeons & Dragons campaign.
And no track on Into the Pandemonium embraces the band’s strangeness quite like its choice of a 12” single, a song that melds Sprechstimme narrative, Greek chorus portent, and louche metal: “I Won’t Dance.” And that’s saying something, since the album opens with a peculiar cover of “Mexican Radio” (Wall of Voodoo’s novel new wave hit from five years prior) and the single also highlighted “One in Their Pride,” which threads Apollo mission vocal samples, a screeching string section, and an admirably stark drum machine beat.
But “I Won’t Dance” is its own ball of narrative-macerating, mood-inducing strangeness — and genre-defying, too. At the time, arcane stylistic elements distinguished Celtic Frost from the guitar/bass/drums purism that often defines metal to this day. Note: 1987 is the same year Metallica reaffirmed its roots with The $5.98 E.P. / $9.98 CD: Garage Days Re-Revisited, essentially its authenticity-reclaiming answer to the Who’s Live at Leeds. Celtic Frost, meanwhile, flirted with metal blasphemy — deserving of the Hieronymous Bosch hellscape painting on the album’s gatefold cover.
On “I Won’t Dance,” two specific types of strange — the paranormal and the categorical — align in the voice of Thomas Gabriel Warrior, the band’s lead singer and vampirically skeletal focal point. His bark has a clenched-fist charm, his metric emphasis like Christopher Walken on an emo bender. (In retrospect, one recognizes the kinship Warrior must have felt with Voodoo’s lead singer, Stan Ridgway.) And the song’s intense bass drums make the case that the flirtation with industrial music on “One in Their Pride” was redundant: even with a human drummer (Reed St. Mark), Celtic Frost is brutally mechanized.
And then there are those trademark Celtic Frost lyrics, which is to say: those near-impenetrable syllables. Warrior unleashes flourishes of dramatic omen-slinging that require attention to the inner sleeve to even begin to comprehend (“Deterrent vibrates the allurements face / As my barque drowns toward conquest”). And as if the verbal painting isn’t sufficient, sound effects further smudge the mystery, turning voices into spectral visitations.
And each time around comes that defiant chorus: “I won’t dance / I won’t dance within despair,” which despite being — by Celtic Frost standards — pretty darn straightforward, remains confounding decades later: Why is the singer on thrash metal’s slinkiest album telling us he won’t dance, when the music demands we do exactly that? Then there’s the problematically named “orient” at the center of the tale: Is this a member of some cursed royal court, or is it a statement about the current inclination of the “elder” of whom Warrior sings?
No matter: three dozen years after the song’s debut, I’m sucked into its enigmas easily — and then into the album as a whole. So much metal of that era has become, over time, the stuff of Gen X sing-alongs, but Into the Pandemonium remains just as strange as on the day of its release.
This one goes out to Eric Engelhardt (1966-2007).
MÖSH YOUR ENTHUSIASM: INTRODUCTION by Heather Quinlan | Crockett Doob on Metallica’s ENTER SANDMAN | Dean Haspiel on Mötley Crüe’s HOME SWEET HOME | Jack Silbert on Poison’s TALK DIRTY TO ME | Adam McGovern on Dio’s INVISIBLE | Mariane Cara on Faith No More’s EPIC | Heather Quinlan on Blue Öyster Cult’s SHOOTING SHARK | Steve Schneider on UFO’s DIESEL IN THE DUST | Carlo Rotella on Primus’ JERRY WAS A RACE CAR DRIVER | Erik Davis on St. Vitus’ BORN TOO LATE | Greg Rowland on Motörhead’s ACE OF SPADES (remix) | Kathy Biehl on Twisted Sister’s WE’RE NOT GONNA TAKE IT | Nikhil Singh on G.I.S.M.’s GAS BURNER PANIC | Erin M. Routson on Metallica’s ESCAPE | Holly Interlandi on Helmet’s MILQUETOAST | Marc Weidenbaum on Celtic Frost’s I WON’T DANCE (THE ELDERS’ ORIENT) | Amy Keyishian on Living Colour’s CULT OF PERSONALITY | Josh Glenn on Scorpions’ STILL LOVING YOU | Alycia Chillemi on Danzig’s SOUL ON FIRE | James Parker on Godflesh’s CHRISTBAIT RISING | Miranda Mellis on The Afflicted’s HERE COME THE COPS | Rene Rosa on Type O Negative’s BLACK NO. 1 | Tony Leone on Slayer’s SOUTH OF HEAVEN | Christopher Cannon on Neurosis’s LOST | Brian Berger on Black Sabbath’s HEADLESS CROSS | MÖSH CONTEST-WINNING ENTRY: Tony Pacitti on Metallica’s THE CALL OF KTULU. PLUS: CONTEST RUNNER-UP: James Scott Maloy on Accept’s MIDNIGHT MOVER.
JACK KIRBY PANELS | CAPTAIN KIRK SCENES | OLD-SCHOOL HIP HOP | TYPEFACES | NEW WAVE | SQUADS | PUNK | NEO-NOIR MOVIES | COMICS | SCI-FI MOVIES | SIDEKICKS | CARTOONS | TV DEATHS | COUNTRY | PROTO-PUNK | METAL | & more enthusiasms!