A DESCENT INTO THE PANDEMONIUM

Early Halloween greets! Ready for a seasonal resurrection from the metal crypt?

Good – because Celtic Frost‘s 1987 meisterwork Into the Pandemonium is a dead cert Halloween enhancer. Here’s why. 

First, the artwork – that hellish extraction from Garden of Earthly Delights by Hieronymous Bosch – is pure badass badness that lays out the goth factor before you even hit play, especially if you’re eyeing the cassette artwork where the zoomed-in crop brings more proximity to flames, falling bodies and all-round damnation. 

Second, Celtic Frost always fits the ‘ween vibe and that’s a cold-bodied fact. But this album, when they went full tilt for orchestral strings, horns and operatic duets after To Mega Therion’s dabble, is a Halloween double-good. Avant garde was the descriptor of the day and whether or not that’s fully accurate, Pandemonium IS experimental and does smash genre orthodoxy and listener expectations so, for that, we salute. Art metal, progressive metal, experimental metal, maybe even death metal – as in, death hangs in its damp air – are all fair game, label-wise.

Looking at some reviews on Metal Archives though and we see that Into the Pandemonium isn’t universally loved. Lowest rating = 17%. Plenty of bile is hurled at One in Their Pride for its programmed beats, NASA samples and general non-metal spirit but it’s always sounded good to me, working like an oddball interlude where dashes of horror-suspense strings still manage to connect it to the rest of the record. Sure, it’s primitive tech-wise but this was 1987, FFS. What were electro-metal supremos Ministry doing back then? 

Becoming Ministry, that’s what. They sure as shit weren’t doing Stigmata. Not yet.  

Tom G Warrior’s voice draws plenty of criticism on the Archives – much bemoaning of the moaning. It’s almost a fair point but his style is essential to the Pandemonium mood and, surely, he’s gunning for an effect: the translucent nearly-dead. Hence the Halloween allure.

The first track is a cover of Mexican Radio (never checked the Wall of Voodoo original until today – decades of shameful oversight right there, it’s ace) and it rocks metally, but it’s the following Mesmerized that introduces the gothic undertones, un-thrash pace drag and wobbly spectrals that come to define Pandemonium’s tone. Claudia-Maria Mokri takes the backing vocals and Warrior’s guitar is, as ever, cloaked in mausoleum chill even when it flirts with 80s pop rock (anyone else getting a blinky flash of Steve Stevens’ pre-verse Rebel Yell riffing halfway through?). All the while, Martin Eric Ain’s rolling bass hollows the earthly life out of it.

Skipping past Inner Sanctum just for a sec, we get our first fully-fledged case of the non-metal avants. Tristesses de la Lune, all cold vapors and morose orchestration, is voiced entirely by Manu Moan and drips moonlit melancholy over dancing strings and buried buzzsaw grind.

But Rex Irae (Requiem) takes it further. This track, a full-on duet between Warrior and Mokri with an oddly groovesome meter, is the fullest realisation of orchestral haunt. String stabs, scrapes and accents alongside Warrior’s nearly-dead vox pitch into sweeping overtures that make it the goth standout of the album – and the first part of the Requiem triptych that took more than 30 years for Warrior to complete. If there’s one track to nab as a standalone Halloweener, this is it. Might as well add Oriental Masquerade while you’re at it, given that it shuts the album down with doomy ceremonial grandeur.  

So, there’s no shortage of graveyard atmospherics on Into the Pandemonium … but that doesn’t mean it lacks blackened metallics either. Inner Sanctum predates thrash metal’s move towards the mainstream four years before the Black Album but with more diabolus in musica, and I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient) fucking MOTORS with anthemic cool and unbreakable beats.

Really, for Halloween, you could pick pretty much any Tom G Warrior record and it’ll fit. Sticking with Celtic Frost, Monotheist‘s bleak pitch-black brutality and To Mega Therion‘s gothic thrash energy are both right up there. But for seasonal spook in sound and vision, Into the Pandemonium just about has the edge – more wayward, irrational, mercurial and over-reaching.

It’s just that bit more vamp, don’t you think?

Cassette tracklist:

Mexican Radio
Mesmerized
Inner Sanctum
Tristesses de la Lune
Babylon Fell
Caress Into Oblivion
One in their Pride
I Won’t Dance (the Elders’ Orient)
Rex Irae (Requiem)
Oriental Masquerade

(Sorrows of the Moon does not appear on the original tape but does appear on other formats. Tristesses de la Lune features Charles Baudelaire’s poem in French. Sorrows of the Moon is the English translation but has different music. Running orders vary depending on release and format. Confusing, I know…)

Want a nightmare soundtrack? Try this Sunn O))) for size. Or search Halloween for old-school metal playlists, creepsome cover versions, Mike Patton, Type O Negative, you get the gist