“What ever happened to Celtic Frost? Is it true that they got lost? In the Pandemonium, never to be seen again?” — S.O.D. May 18, 1999.

If you read my previous article about Venom, let me remind you of a few things about the way the 80’s and 90’s worked and didn’t work. On the West Coast of the United States, there wasn’t a lot of news about European metal bands that were not consistently hitting the mainstream. We had “metal magazines.” And the best Metal magazine I was able to find back in those days was Metal Maniacs Magazine. So for example when Venom came out with Cast in Stone in 1997, I never heard about it. And the internet wasn’t nearly what it is today in 2022.

Celtic Frost was a band that became brutally and viciously alive in 1984 but then kind of “died by accidental suicide” 4 years later in 1988. The first 3 years of their existence were their best 3 years. (Alas, imagine a band making a big mistake in life and then asking their fans to please forget about it, and their fans actually doing exactly that for you.) The band somewhat self-resurrected in 1990, but seemed to kind of go into a coma until 2006.

In 1987, I was 14, a Freshman in a Catholic high school, and at that time I was very into Venom and Slayer. It’s hard to remember when I first got a Celtic Frost album. (Again, CASSETTE.) I think I owned 1984’s Morbid Tales album, the Tragic Serenades EP, the Emperor’s Return EP, and the To Mega Therion album. But they weren’t getting the heavy rotation in my walkman like Venom and Slayer were. However, in 1988, I was 15, a Sophomore at a different Catholic high school, and Celtic Frost somehow became my whole world. And like I said, by that time the band had died and I didn’t even know about it or know the details, or anything. What had happened was I bought Celtic Frost’s Into the Pandemonium album. And that album seriously did it for me. I think it did it for a lot of metal musicians as well, because in the back of the metal zines you could dig up information about obscure-ass “gothic metal” bands that seemed to be chasing the sound, style, and vision of Into the Pandemonium. Here is a pretty good going-back-in-time review of the album.

What’s on Into the Pandemonium that sends it way over the top? For starters, I’d say the second-to-last track Rex Irae (Requiem). This was the first time I’d ever heard classical music and a female opera singer combined with heavy metal, and I was blown away. The song “I Won’t Dance” also featured female vocals, as backup vocals actually. The female vocals sounded like what I’d call “pop-rock vocals,” and I thought it was awesome. The guitar riffology on the album was also badass. There is a female-vocals-classical-sounding track on the CASSETTE called Tristesses De La Lune that I didn’t discover had a more metal version called Sorrows of the Moon until I bought the album on VINYL maybe 3 years later, which had superb guitar riffology. “Riffology.” “Riffage.” Maybe those are “my words” I’ve made up or something. But what I mean by that is the intelligent arranging, juxtapositioning, layering, and stacking of guitar phrasings and riffs. Obviously, you can do this in an infinite amount of ways, but when you do it in a way that produces an emotional result, a feeling, or a mood, or sense of intrigue, you’ve really got something.

If the world didn’t have Into the Pandemonium, we might never have had a band like Dimmu Borgir doing live performances with classical musicians. I don’t think there’s any way you could change my opinion on this. Even the Christian metal band Believer was chasing the 1987 Celtic Frost sound with their song Dies Irae.

That is not to say I think Celtic Frost qualified as a “black metal” band, exactly. Nor do they quite qualify as a “death metal” band or a “gothic metal” band. Of course they are at the very least a “thrash metal” band. You could say they are some kind of hybrid of all four genres. They certainly influenced all four genres. And they are certainly the Godfathers of the “goth metal” genre. They are at least part-Godfather to black metal and death metal. (Goth metal is kind of a flailing genre, to be honest. Goth metal elements so far seem to be better executed by black metal bands.) Recall that in my previous article about Venom, Christianity got under my skin enough to where I disposed of my Venom collection. I didn’t do that with Celtic Frost. Whether they’re part-Godfather to black metal or not, they just didn’t make the chopping block. If any Christian wants to go back in a time machine with me to 1992, maybe they could win a debate with “1992-me” about it.

I’ve sometimes wondered if one of the unintended effects of Into the Pandemonium was that it got me to re-review what it was they were doing with Morbid Tales, Emperor’s Return, and To Mega Therion. It was as if those albums improved and went up a few notches in favor.

So I did eventually discover Celtic Frost’s mistake-album entitled Cold Lake. It was cringe before people even knew what cringe was. (Lol, ok, yes, I threw THAT album away because it was Satanic. Matter of fact, Tom Warrior was probably possessed by the devil when he made that album.) Nobody talks about that album. Would you or anybody else really believe it is technically a “glam metal” album? I will say for a while it made conversations about Celtic Frost difficult because, seriously, somebody might’ve heard the Cold Lake album or saw the cringe “Cherry Orchards” video on MTV and immediately said, “FUCK THIS GARBAGE-ASS BAND” without having any idea of the stellar metal music Celtic Frost had done just before the Cold Lake mistake. So when you met somebody like that you had to kind of do a big song and dance explaining that Morbid Tales, Emperor’s Return, To Mega Therion, and Into the Pandemonium A) exist, and B) are awesome and definitely worth their while. I know I wasn’t the only metalhead that was doing that.

Another thing about the Cold Lake album was… Tom Warrior’s vocal sound was was super-cringe. 1990 saw the release of kind of “comeback attempt #1” with the album Vanity/Nemesis. I will say it’s a good album. I liked the album. But, I kind of also had “unconditional love” for the 1984 to 1987 CF years — I confess I was probably doing more “putting up” with Tom Warrior’s vocals than I was actually digging them. I mean, wtf, listen to Wine in my Hand. Tell me the riffage and the drums on that song aren’t cool. They ARE cool as fuck. But somehow, you gotta wire your ears to deal with those vocals. It’s not like he’s out-of-key. It’s a “timbre” issue. (Maybe even a foreign accent issue – which might be a topic for another article.) But it begs the question what was going on with Warrior’s voice in 1988 and 1990? I remember getting this album in high school and I was really happy to have it. I even found and bought a Vanity/Nemesis t-shirt. For me, the band was back!

Or so I thought… Matter of fact, when I saw S.O.D. in 1999, after they played their #1 hit song “Celtic Frosted Flakes,” Scott Ian would give the audience a humorous update, like this one, of the band members whereabouts. I had to wait until 2006 for the real comeback.

2006 saw the release of the Monotheist album. A real, legitimate return to the 1984 to 1987 years. And on October 11, 2006, I finally saw Celtic Frost in Denver Colorado. Couple of interesting things about it. I took my girlfriend at the time, and, y’know how a girlfriend or a date can ruin these types of experiences? I WAS LUCKY that I had an awesome girlfriend at the time, and she didn’t ruin my Celtic Frost experience one bit. (Yeah, yeah, maybe I should’ve put a ring on that one, lol.) The other interesting thing about it was… there was no “mosh pit.” The audience was kind of standing in awe of what was going on. Probably 80% to 100% of all the metalheads there knew the Celtic Frost story all too well, and we were all stoked and stunned to finally see that band. In fact, after that show, the band went to the concert hall lobby and gave autographs. I got my fucking ticket autographed by all the dudes! I would later see them again in Denver open for Type-O-Negative. (Me and my gf were kinda late to that show, ugh.) The sound was dialed in better by the sound engineers that night. And also… again, no mosh pit. To be honest, it’s ok for me that I never got to mosh to Celtic Frost. Maybe as you get older you don’t care as much about these things?

So by this time, it seemed Celtic Frost was back on the map and another force to be reckoned with in the world of metal. They were playing rad shows in European festivals, and everything else. And then they broke up again. I guess Tom Warrior and Martin Eric Ain had a difficult musicians-relationship. You can dig around online for the deets about it.

Anyway, Warrior was not-at-all done with his time in the sun. (Maybe not the best idiom, considering the musical genre.) In 2008, Warrior founded the band Triptykon. Triptykon is still a continuation of the 1984 to 1987 Celtic Frost sound, though not so much the Into the Pandemonium album.

I got to see Triptykon October 19, 2010. What I did not expect to see, was the hottest European goth-metal chick I’d ever laid eyes on playing the bass guitar. In late 2007, I had broken up with the GF I saw CF with, so I was at this show by myself. I learned this bassist chick was named Vanja Slajh. And I totally hit on her because… fuckin’ a. Had to. Lol, nothing came of it, of course. Damn. She is hot. A cutie and a hottie. Where the fuck did Tom Warrior find this woman? In spite of my akward advances, Vanja did autograph my Triptkon ticket. AND, I got to meet Tom Warrior in a way wherein I could actually talk to him for a minute or so. I was like, “Dude! I love your music! I’ve got all your shit! I love it! Keep having fun and doing what you do!” I think I even shook his hand. I got his autograph (again) as well. It was cool. It was also apparent to me that Warrior is… not a tall guy. I’m 6’4″. I don’t think he’s a full foot shorter than me, but maybe he is? (It’s a little weird when yourself as a tall dude sorta find out you’ve been idolizing a shorter dude for many years of your life, going all the way back to high school.) I talked to the Triptykon drummer for a while, basic fan-to-musician stuff – I can’t recall what. But nobody was really talking with him, so I was like, “fuckit, I’ll talk to him.”

Warrior and his band Triptykon have been kind of doing a bit of everything, even performances of old Hellhammer material. Hellhammer was the like predecessor to Celtic Frost. I wasn’t really into Hellhammer’s music, but, damn, if Vanja Slajh is playing bass, I can get more interested now. Actually, there is some blonde chick (I don’t know her name) that also plays bass for TG Warrior, so if you do a search for live Hellhammer performances on YouTube you might see the blonde chick instead of Vanja. That’s fine, but I’m more into Vanja.

In my previous article about Venom, I’d said at some point Venom or some band willing to cover Venom needs to deliver their full 20+ minute epic, At War with Satan, live. All of it. And as motivational fuel I present to you, Celtic Frost’s “Rex Irae (Requiem).”

(And yeah, that’s my babe Vanja Slajh on bass…) What’s amazing about this, is I never ever thought this song could or would be played live. It’s rad as fuck that this happened. The whole friggin’ story of that song was recorded at this performance. Technically this is Triptykon with the “Metropole Orkest.” The whole thing is called Requiem, Live at Roadburn 2019. I had NO IDEA that this was even going on, I just happened to be fucking around on YouTube one day and found it. What email list do I have to be on to get news about these things? But also, it’s fair to say that I’d moved on from the the TG Warrior world between 1990 and 2006, so, even though I was able to dive back into it in 2006, it hasn’t been the only thing on my radar. Plus, how much do I really wanna be a drooling fan-boy of Ms. Slajh?

Y’know that fucking Blondie song, “Call Me”?
Yeah honey, call me!

Anyway, let’s go back into the 1980’s for one more minute… There was a 1986 tour that remains legendary to this day. Celtic Frost, Voivod, and Running Wild. From what I understand, they even came through good ‘ol Portland Oregon on this tour. And from what I understand, the Celtic Frost performance was NUTS. Not just a mosh pit, but I’d heard tales that guys were fucking climbing the friggin’ walls of the venue. There was a super-rare Celtic Frost tour t-shirt that was sold at these shows. It’s the headless bat design you see behind Reed St. Mark’s drum set in this video. It is metal as fuck. A few years ago I found and bought bootlegs of this t-shirt online.

Because of this tour, and the shows they played at this tour, there is a certain type of Gen-X metalhead out there now. Sometimes, you’ll meet a guy who went to one of those shows on that tour. And that’s cool as fuck. I was literally only 13 at that time, and I was thriving off of Metallica’s Kill ‘Em All. That tour was just before I had any idea that Celtic Frost was a band. Not to mention, I was young, and way too young to go to shows at that time. Of course I “missed” the Celtic Frost heyday. It’s also kind of weird how close I missed it by.

I may write more about Celtic Frost later. This article kind of feels underdone, in a way. One thing I should add is that bassist Martin Eric Ain passed in October 2017. R.I.P. From his 2006 performances introducing the song “Ain Elohim” by shouting “There is no God!” before the song, it sounded like he was atheist. But if he’s wrong about that, then may God rest his soul. Or whatever happens to metal musicians when they pass.

[Article endnote. Is Celtic Frost pronounced “Seltic Frost” or “Keltic Frost”? I go with Seltic. Critics say it should technically be Keltic. In their heyday, everybody said Seltic, even the bandmembers. However, now sometimes even TG Warrior himself will pronounce it as Keltic. I kinda don’t care.]