Melissa - Mercyful Fate

 

Provenance: This one's easy - as a consequence of hearing the Mercyful Fate medley from Metallica's Garage Inc. album, I really had no choice but to get this bad boy by Denmark's finest.

Review: This whips ass.

Genuinely, I could leave it there and consider it a suitable review. Why expend a bunch of bytes and bloviation on Melissa when anybody with one working lughole could tell you that this smokes?

The album cover is cool; King Diamond (lead screamer) looks like some unholy mashup of Ace Frehley, Rob Halford and Dave Vanian; and a simple rundown of the track listing should give one a flavour as to how motherfucking incredible this platter is going to be: 'Evil', 'Curse of the Pharaohs', 'Into The Coven', 'At The Sound of the Demon Bell'...it goes on, but I could just halt here and let those marinade in your brainbox for a while.

I often have the albums on loud when I'm reviewing them. This one, however, was cranked to distinctly un-neighbourly volumes, and I'm banking on either being taken down by an armed response unit or being worshipped by the locals as the true spawn of Wotan. 

Perhaps you might appreciate some context around this sulphurous little beauty; this is Mercyful Fate's debut album, released in 1983 just around the time that the New Wave of British Heavy Metal was losing momentum. However, this makes Melissa contemporaneous with some important Euro-metal developments, not least of all the release of  German outfit Accept's Balls To The Wall. I highlight this album in particular because Accept shared with Mercyful Fate a sensibility that includes classical influences. This represents something of a break from most NWOBHM bands, who still looked towards the pentatonic-based hard rock of the 1970s for musical cues.

Which isn't to say that Melissa doesn't sound like a NWOBHM release - it absolutely does for the most part. However, unlike the Roundhouse mob, who flirted with demonic imagery without ever really going the whole hog, the Mercyful Fate of Melissa definitively choose the left-hand path, and in doing so would influence bands like Morbid Angel and one of my faves, Death. They're probably just pipped to the post of black metal pioneers by Venom, but as a listening experience Venom suck whilst this slaps, so let's call Mercyful Fate the first good black metal band.

Why? Because they're songs are full of Tonka-truck sized riffs, banshee screams and some inventive soloing from guitarist Hank Sherman. Really, King's vocals cannot be emphasised enough - his mid-range is characterful (and not unlike fellow Scandinavian Tobias Forge of Ghost, tonally speaking) but it's the Halford-esque falsetto that powers these tracks to new heights. There are great King Diamond moments all over the shop, but probably the bit that tickles me most is on 'Black Funeral' where he first sings "Oh, hail Satan" in his chest voice, and then replies to himself with "YES, HAIL SATAN!" in his ghoul-shriek. Stryper never did anything half this fun, and that's why Lucifer, Son of the Morning, is winning the rock 'n' roll stakes.

As mentioned before, the riffage is supreme and each song has about a million great examples. My favourites are probably those that underpin the chorus to 'Into The Coven' (one of the wretched PMRC's so-called 'Filthy Fifteen' songs) and the bit in 'Satan's Fall' where King spits "Bringing the blood of a newborn child!", plus virtually every moment in 'Curse of the Pharaohs' (sample lyric: "Don't touch, never ever steal / Unless, you're in for the kill"), a song that should be the Danish national anthem. (NB: having said that, Denmark's national anthem does have some pretty heavy metal lyrics; don't let "There is a lovely country" fool you, the rest of it rips.)

All this winds up with the strange, chilling tale of the title character, Melissa, who we are told is a witch and it is heavily implied that she's been executed for her eldritch practices. But is she truly gone...? Great business, all told. I can't get enough of this. As it so happens, King Diamond used to own a human skull he named Melissa; par for the course, one could surmise, for guy who also has a microphone stand made from human leg bones. Plus, after leaving Mercyful Fate he did a bonkers track about his "grandmaaaaaa!". Essential heavy metal.

 

In League With Satan - Venom

Provenance: A guy at university wouldn't shut up about how important Venom were, so I caved and bought this two disc compilation to see what the fuss is all about.

Review: I guess that listening to In League With Satan brought home to me that importance is a slippery old concept to get a handle on. Venom are, arguably, very important to the development of heavy metal. Musically they influenced the nascent thrash scene, but on a more wholesale level could be said to have birthed black metal. Venom synthesised a host of their own influences - punk, heavy metal, Satanism, Amicus horror movies - into the fundaments of black metal, aesthetically, stylistically and thematically.

Venom were also, on the basis of this compilation, spectacularly awful.

It begs the question - just because an artist heralds a new movement within a genre, do we still need to listen to them? This, after all, was my imperative to check out Venom in the first place. I have no real l33t or kvlt credentials to my name (if we exclude In League With Satan I own perhaps three black metal albums) so maybe I am entirely the wrong person to attempt to peer through the auditory fog to try and identify what the chin-strokers see in tracks such as 'One Thousand Days in Sodom', 'The Seven Gates of Hell' and, perhaps the best title in metal history, 'Aaaaarghhh'; but to those who do tread along the Shining Path set out by the Lord of Lies, surely this also sounds like dogshit?

Yet there are people out there who love Venom. I recall waiting in line to see My Ruin at the Cavern in Exeter (what memories!) and falling into conversation with a chap in the queue. What started off as a fairly genial chat about rollercoasters descended to the point where he threw a punch at me (which I dodged, utilising a 'Drunken Master' defence style (NB: I was drunk)) because I made fun of Venom. More specifically, I made fun of the shrine to Venom he had set up in his flat, but the point remains - I may see Venom as heavy metal clowns, but my erstwhile opponent saw them as important enough to, perhaps, offer sacrifices in their name.

Despite my personal opinion that In League With Satan is a buffoonish parade of the ripest incompetence, I'll at least try to pay dues where earned. Black Sabbath and Led Zeppelin flirted with Satanism, but Venom really go all out - they are the bogeymen that housewives clutching their pearls to Kiss worried about. That in itself is quite fun, though if I were Old Nick, and this was the music I was allotted in the late twentieth century, I would go back to tuning guitars at the crossroads. The music itself does push towards what were the extremes of speed and volume at the time, but without the whipcrack discipline of Motorhead it often descends into a churning heavy metal gazpacho, which has its own strange charm. Bassist and "singer" Cronos is either a bonehead or the most mordant wit in the game; either way, his dumbass lyrics, when discernible, are entertaining enough.

I don't really know what else to say. There's a link between the production values on the material from first album Welcome To Hell (music journalist Geoff Barton memorably said it possessed the "hi-fi dynamics of a fifty year-old pizza", but went on to give it five stars) and the lo-fi approach cultivated by many subsequent black metallers, for sure. It's as if studio polish and distinct separation of instruments are part of the realm of fakery, representing yet another branch of metal's oddly explicit obsession with authenticity (think Manowar's 'All Men Play On Ten' and 'Death To False Metal', or the graphics in Nitro's O.F.R. release that suggested that not only were keyboards not used but moreover were entirely banned from the recording process altogether). Abhorrence towards sounding good seems rather precious and faintly ridiculous (to this Steely Dan fan, hyuk hyuk), but here again, I am almost definitely missing the point. You want to sound ugly, brutal and antisocial.

But do you want to to sound stupid?

Nonetheless, In League With Satan represents a triumph, of sorts. Venom found a sound and a look that stood out; they found a sympathetic label in Neat Records, also from the north-east of England, who championed their local scene, putting out landmark releases by bands such as Raven, Jaguar and Blitzkrieg. They rode that horse all the way home, smoke-bombing stages around the world to the strains of 'Genocide', 'Satanarchist', and 'Blood Lust', and gave a lot of angry Norwegian kids a blueprint for their own creative efforts. Not all bad, then...?

Opus Eponymous - Ghost

Provenance: For a band who I've followed avidly since they first burst onto the scene about ten years ago, my memories of how I became with Ghost acquainted are fuzzy.

I certainly recall my first live encounter with the band - March 2013, when they headlined that year's Jagermeister Tour; support acts were Gojira and The Defiled. Caught it down in Bournemouth with a few friends and family, tickets costing a princely five quid. Even back then, Ghost put on a hell of a show.

Anyway, last month I spent a week in North Macedonia and listened to fourth album Prequelle on the flights there and back. Having initially dismissed the latest as a bit ballad-heavy, I am now inclined to see it as their strongest album to date. So, having recently used this blog to pretend that I'm an adult with grown-up tastes, I now think it's time to check out a bunch of Scandinavians who wear masks and pretend to worship Satan.

Review: Prior to pressing 'play' on my stereo, I had a horrible impression that I was going to be less than fair with Opus Eponymous. What I saw in Bournemouth all those years ago was exciting and theatrical, but absolutely nothing like the slick outfit Ghost have subsequently become (I saw them in Brighton a couple of years ago for significantly more than a Lady Godiva). Likewise, the music on Prequelle is rich in texture and nuance, great swathes of orchestration wrapping around songs that have one eye on the charts (NB: this album didn't do any business in the US, whilst Prequelle peaked at number three on the Billboard Top 200).

Then again, at this point in time, there was still a lot of fun to be had around Ghost's identities. Taking a leaf out of the Kiss playbook, the songwriting on Opus Eponymous was credited to 'a Ghoul Writer'; the frontman was the mysterious Papa Emeritus, and the band referred to as 'a host of Nameless Ghouls'. Furthermore, the album sported cool artwork and reinvigorated a strain of metal that could be subtle yet heavy, sinister yet campy and unafraid to revel in showmanship. In short, they basically revived 1972-77 era Blue Oyster Cult, but this time, with added devilry.

(Even the symbol Ghost use has a touch of the Kronos motif Blue Oyster Cult deployed on all their albums. Catnip for BOC geeks such as myself.)

I don't think it comes as a surprise that a collection quite so schlocky as Opus Eponymous opens up with a church organ dirge. Pretty standard stuff, really, when it comes to albums that celebrate Old Nick. All well and good for setting the scene, but it's over quite quickly and we're into the galloping 'Con Clavi Con Dio', which is what all of us in the peanut gallery came for. It's fucking badass - and makes me realise that although Ghost were working with a much more basic palette than on subsequent releases, that ability to fuse tunefulness and heaviness was there from the word go. One suspects that were this to appear on Meliora or Prequelle, it would be washed with keyboards and other such orchestration. One thing that does stand out is that the music has more 'gaps' than the thick tapestry of sound that typifies later releases.

Still, this no-frills approach gives it a pleasingly retro feel. Vocals aside, much of Opus Eponymous sounds like it could've been disinterred from the mid-1970s, or maybe the first dark flowering of the NWOBHM. This ersatz dustiness - a false vintage - perhaps puts Ghost, at least here, in the bracket of some kind of eldritch Sha Na Na, inviting the listener on a journey to a time that never quite took place in the first place. I'm not suggesting for a moment that Ghost belong in any serious kind of discussion about hauntology but their Blue Oyster Cult cosplay act is damn convincing.

I keep mentioning BOC here, and at this juncture I should also throw in other obvious influences such as Mercyful Fate, Alice Cooper, the Crazy World of Arthur Brown, Slayer; they're all there. But - but - but - you can taste the fact that Tobias Forge (the leader and frontman of Ghost) is intimately familiar with Long Island's finest between, especially that golden stretch between Tyranny and Mutation and Spectres. Damn it all, the keys in 'Con Clavi Con Dio' sound like they've been ripped from 'Tattoo Vampire'. Elsewhere, there are echoes of 'Flaming Telepaths', 'Career of Evil', 'Quicklime Girl' - the good news is that Forge's borrowings are from the absolute prime cuts, so it's all good. Greta Van Fleet, take note; when you want to emulate your heroes, just try and do it well in the first instance, yeah?

In any case, none of this would add up to a hill of beans if the songs aren't there - and, praise Satan, they really are. Forge isn't a screamer; in fact, for a metal singer his voice is quite soft, made even more pliant by enunciation informed by his Swedish background. However, if anything this makes the music sound even more unworldly and uncanny; compare and contrast with Kiss, who for all their attempts to shock polite society, couldn't hide the fact that they were a bunch of Noo Yawk schlubs if their lives depended on it. Instead, Forge relies on a building a sense of drama and majesty to propel his infernal ditties and it works splendidly. Ghost celebrate the Father of Lies with all the pomp and ceremony of a High Mass, and choruses to tracks such as 'Elizabeth' (about Elizabeth Bathory), 'Stand By Him' and 'Death Knell' simultaneously soar to the heavens and plumb the fiery depths.

Having listened to Opus Eponymous again, so soon after spending a lot of time with Prequelle, has brought me not only a sense of relief (i.e. that it's a banger) but also reminded me why I was so revved up by Ghost almost a decade ago. It's yanked me back to a small concert room in Bournemouth, and to marvelling at the audacity of trying to conceal the band's identities in the online age. The latter couldn't last, of course, but I enjoyed the schtick at the time. With a whiff of brimstone and a smear of greasepaint, Ghost delved backwards to bring the joy of the old-timey rock 'n' roll spectacle to the twenty-first century, for which we should all be grateful.