Celtic Frost
Into The Pandemonium

Many times when reading an album review (and here I refer to DeB and our colleagues on TrueMetal), we listen to the reviewer who tells us the history of the album, anecdotes, historical importance, what he had for breakfast this morning and so on.

In short, they tell us everything, except how this record "feels on the skin." Well... I'm sorry to disappoint you, but it's not easy at all to convey what this record represents

Yes, because you must know that imagining the sound of this album for someone who has never listened to it is like trying to explain the difference between red and blue to someone who has been blind from birth.

Even determining the genre is a serious problem: at the time (1987) the term "avant-garde metal" was coined, fully deserved: indeed, "Into the Pandemonium" stands to music as Warhol's madness stands to art.
However, it's easier to simply define it as "extreme metal", because this record is extreme in everything, atmosphere, musical complexity, harshness in a broad sense, innovativeness, in short in any way that "extreme" can mean.
I try to summarize: "Into The Pandemonium" is an Opera. A magnificent work that ranges from the purest metal to the most hallucinated and twisted psychedelia. In this fundamental chapter, Tom G. Warrior & Co show a level of expressive quality achieved by few until then. They play to broaden the horizons of musical extremism, and in a scene where playing at the limit too often meant offering a linear, flat, monotonous thrash (see Possessed, Venom).

It's a record that is even adverse to the listener, which tries in every way to distract them from their attempt to understand it. No one, and I mean no one, ever had a great impression on the first listen: generally torn between disappointment and an undefined sensation of "strangeness" of the record, rather than true value, only the minority who continued to listen to it more and more times assimilated it for what it is, namely a masterpiece.
The riffs tend to have little symmetry, the notes appear disordered, not responding to any rational organization of melody, the impression is of total passionate abandonment by those who composed. Naturally, it's just an impression, because to overcome the initial aversion the attention to compositional detail must be triple compared to works with more conventional structures. Thus, a free rein to lopsided drum riffs, tons of tempo changes, strange rhythms, bars played at sometimes unnatural speeds, so much so that they appear restless rather than powerful, countertimes and inclusion of normally unused sounds.

Want an example? Listen to the track "One In Their Pride". An electronic drum set halfway between house and dance, sharp and clumsy violins, and a sampled voice obsessively repeating the song title. And they have already created an atmosphere of paranoia, which has rarely been reached at that level in metal.

To leave for posterity.

"I don't care if we are the heaviest or the lightest, the most commercial or the most poser band.

We try to be different, to be something new.”

Tom G. Warrior, 1986