1984 is an exciting year to listen to Celtic Frost. At this point, Hellhammer is still fresh in the minds of the musicians. In fact, the only official Hellhamer EP comes out this same year. So, while the music here is already streamlined as opposed to the jigsaw method of Hellhammer, chaotic energy still suffuses the way the instruments are played. These early Celtic Frost riffs are also still reminiscent of the savagery of the youthful enterprise and which will weaken quickly album by album.
The title track ‘Morbid Tales’ gives off an odor you could immediately identify as coming from an older and already putrefying body. The obvious heavy chromaticism and danceable rhythms that sometimes come through in this track will be traded away by the marching rhythms of Celtic Frost that move only in one direction as we hear on ‘Procreation (of the Wicked)’.
In many ways, Morbid Tales is as exciting as Celtic Frost will ever get. Here is where the band comes up with its characteristic style and sound, and everything after is but variations and embellishments on the same thing. Here is also where they play songs that will later figure in To Mega Therion with a hellish zest that is missing from future interpretations.
The savagery of the sound may come in great part from production value, as Morbid Tales definitely comes off as rawer yet at the same time crisper in remastered versions, overall. In part, it may be due to the guitar staying in its lane while keeping a crunchy tone. Beyond that, paying close attention to each of the instruments reveals there is a looseness absent from future and tighter interpretations, a looseness inherent in Hellhammer which allows for smoother variation that surprises the listener with a greater variety of minutiae that is quite welcome in so simple a music.
If this is so, what’s to stop us from just spinning this album and forgetting about the rest of their discography? For one, if you’re interested in the different possibilities Celtic Frost’s raw sound could produce, you’ll be pleased to know Tom G. Warrior rode this same horse in several forays into mainstream-adjacent territories. It is hard to tell whether any of them yielded anything more, in the end, that wasn’t already present in Morbid Tales. That is something we shall explore as we discuss each of their albums in an article of their own.
Even as early as 1984, we hear Celtic Frost winking at post-modernist cosmic horror art. It would later employ Giger’s artwork, but we find here in Morbid Tales a full-length experimental ambient song titled ‘Danse Macabre’ that we could imagine coming from Stockhausen’s mind. Not only do these give us an inkling of the darker, Hellraiser world that Hellhammer and Celtic Frost aimed to explore, but they also allow the listener an entrancing respite from the outright aggression of the rest of the album, giving the whole a wider existence.
The purpose of the album can be interpreted as a mind-bending narrative aggressive enough to detract casual listeners, but unfortunately not deep or clear enough to suck in those interested in going beyond the threshold the music delineates. The intro plays a host of damned voices followed by the driving ‘Into Crypts of Rays’, one of the more Hellhammer-sounding songs of the album along with ‘Morbid Tales’ and ‘Nocturnal Fear’.
The songs alternate speed somewhat with the slower tempos gaining more and more traction until we get to the gravity of ‘Procreation (of the Wicked)’. The song then picks up the pace with the more regular-sounding mid-paced ‘Return of the Eve’, sporting more chug-based riffs in the hallmark sound of Tom G. Warrior.
Here comes the kicker, the atmospheric experimental track follows, kicking us out of the sense of finality. A track that extends way longer than you would imagine. It is tortuous and doesn’t let go of you. It drags you further and further into a pit of despair worthy of the best noise artists. After almost three minutes, you are again treated to one of the fastest songs in the album, an unexpected and brutal finale.
In Morbid Tales we hear the most orderly aspect of Hellhammer and the more savage aspect of Celtic Frost. If we think of the direction of causality extending in all directions, we can see this album as the vortex out of which all springs, both past and present. Infused with the spirit of thrash in technique but transcending it in deed, Celtic Frost (along with the earliest Sepultura, Morbid Angel, and Mayhem) carves open new musical dimensions within the rock-ensemble paradigm descended through Black Sabbath’s lineage.
