Upon reading the album’s title, and being acquainted with the previous one, To Mega Therion, we brace for a hellish adventure more harrowing and transforming. Yet, the opening song here speaks of light-hearted fun and a joking attitude foreshadowed by a name that already concerns us. If we stopped here, insulted by the vulgar slap that disavowed us of our loftiest expectations, we would have missed the rest of a great album full of its own kind of treasure.
In truth, by placing the most overtly insulting track up front, whose arrangements when looked at by themselves satisfy their own logic, we are shocked out of the trajectory our minds had taken and sent stumbling down into the Kafka-esque garden of delights Celtic Frost has now chosen as its playground. The cover art for Into the Pandemonium portrays utter destruction, a city in flames, the night illuminated by flames, and lights issuing from the human habitation, though no human shape appears.
In a move of unabating egocentric willpower, Tom G. Warrior, shows the sense to know that to portray an even deeper pit of despair while still playing rock-instrumented metal music in the proper sense, you cannot go heavier or grimmer than To Mega Therion and still remain intelligible and dynamic.
Not wishing to corner themselves in a niche so small only the strangest of people would listen to the album, Into the Pandemonium explores possibilities in more conventional quarters, spicing up the Celtic Frost riff with shorter sequences, nondescript changes in direction and intensity, and a general blurring of lines, effacing song identities in favor of elongating malleable emotions.
In many ways, Into the Pandemonium is a far less memorable album than To Mega Therion, because its picture is not as clear, opting for dynamism rather than firmness. The Platonic element suffers but the Heraclitean one is enhanced: you never step into the same river twice. Many of the songs here are very radio-friendly if a little too strange for the regular audience.
More than one atmospheric track that changes things up surprises the listener, but ‘Mexican Radio’ has prepared us for everything, making almost anything they throw at us palatable and part of the carnivalesque palette Celtic Frost picked up for this release. And that right there is the crux of our matter: the music remains within a style and centers itself in a shortened, even obscured, take on Celtic Frost’s riffs subsumed under a more mainstream sound, throwing in bells and whistles that shift our position, yet never losing track of the road.
Celtic Frost gave us an ‘epic’ album in their style with To Mega Therion and they’re not about to repeat themselves. The message they speak to us carries that connotation and it also launches us in search of a different meaning. Into the Pandemonium distances itself from the at-once mythological and personal take of the previous album, and instead shows us a world trapped in a recurrent macabre dance, always changing yet always the same.
Rather than suffering from the downfall and the utter fornication of sounds and disregard for a consistent reputation, Celtic Frost creates a melodramatic theater play choked in a drug haze. Though not as memorable as classic Celtic Frost, this work of transition and experimentation remains the freshest, most insinuating, and fun, of listens in all their whole catalog.
