Celtic Frost comes back to seal the deal in updated form. Here the Giger incarnates in the music in a stronger way than ever. In many ways, Monotheist is the album that should have followed To Mega Therion if we lived in a perfect world, in a world where we could change past errors, erase our frivolous missteps and focus completely on the eternal work at hand. Monotheist is not so much the last Celtic Frost album as it is the first and best Triptykon album.
Monotheist comes more than a decade and a half after their original swansong album Vanity/Nemesis, and it is their way of closing a chapter with a ‘return to spirit’ in a different form, akin to Black Sabbath’s 2013 13. It is a futuristic ‘return to form’, though less than the Black Sabbath. Instead, we hear more of an evolution towards the genuinely dark gothic aspects of rock as presented by Samael in Ceremony of Opposites.
Monotheist is heavier, and more spacious than the iconic Samael, allowing for more terrestrial atmospheres to come through. A wild west landscape after a disaster fifty years after artificial intelligence has taken over the world. We hear different voices, different characters in a play, gods in a temporary and effervescent pantheon soon to be gone, gods that emerge from the confluence of man and machine.
Celtic Frost step beyond themselves over the riff monuments they pioneered in 1984-85, and they step out of the chrysalis a whole different creature. If not explicitly told, you would be hard-pressed to recognize this record as Celtic Frost. In contrast to Black Sabbath, Monotheist comes not so much as a dignified farewell statement, and more as a vicious statement of intent. The intention is to move on, giving in entirely to a sonic manifestation of H.R. Giger’s work.
Past the third track, the listener won’t be sure what to expect, but in a good way. The album’s theme is constant, but we are constantly hit by the new slow blasting sound of updated super heavy and slow metal and dark metallic atmospheric passages that reak of machines and oil, of abandonment and despair in a world taken away from humanity, a world in which we only survive at the mercy of a monster we have created.
Thus, slowly contemplated, Monotheist moves away from the more understandable mythological distance of the early days and instead makes our newfound cold and metallic hell a palpable reality. Focusing entirely on the music, flowing with it, will induce a dizzying trance, and force visions of eternal solitude, of a soul trapped in a body sustained for centuries hooked to a city of cables and tubes. Conscience moves on, feeding on never-ending hope, visions of future-building, and swimming electric dreams.
Judicious interleaving of musical approaches gives further life to Monotheist. Goth metal screams out of every crevice of this album. But terror-driven, crushing, more crushing than a regular all-metal or all-rock album. If we underground maniacs forgive its adherence to mainstream parameters, and instead we just engage with it and allow ourselves to synch with its flows and its moods, we are dragged into dimensions that Celtic Frost briefly insinuated in Into the Pandemonium that approached the completely alien soundscapes of Karlheinz Stockhausen (as in Montag aus Licht, or his Helikopter-Streichquartett).
What fault we may find in this album is the result of a poorly balanced rhythm across the album. It starts off with a monstrous attack and then subsides into a series of hypnotic lagoons with occasional heavy metal sections. Then, towards the end of the album, ‘Ain Elohim’ picks up with the energy and constancy we would have expected earlier in the album. By this time, so much has happened, and in an order that does not make particular sense, that despite the wonders of the atmosphere, fatigue hits you square in the face.
As the album draws to a close, we are treated to the furthest reaches of Celtic Frost before it evolves into Triptykon, and we realize we are stepping onto new, eviscerated worlds shielded from the daylight and exposed to the stars. The scenario invites the adventurous few that wish to survive beyond mortal death, not into mystic plains, but into transformative forms through an eternal self-remembrance denuded of illusions, ever joyful, ever smiling, cryptic, and fell.
