– 1984 –
If 1983 was a fairly quiet reprieve for proto-black metal, 1984 was the year the lid came off. Of all the posthumously recognized groundbreakers that annum, no one had a more productive twelves months than Thomas Gabriel Warrior. After a series of EPs the previous year, Gabriel's band Hellhammer made their debut with the widely panned Apocalyptic Raids EP.
While Bruce Day's drumming is way too static to properly anticipate the blastbeat, there is a sepulchral menace to both the dive bomb guitar tone and Gabriel's guttural croaking that adds to the permafrost gradually settling over black metal's icy roots.
Apocalyptic Raids was so negatively received by both fans and critics alike that Gabriel quickly rounded up Hellhammer bassist Martin Ain and formed a new band, Celtic Frost. Amazingly, Frost were able to complete and release an EP, Morbid Tales, by year's end, yet another sign of Gabriel's restless urge to put Apocalyptic Raids behind him.
Morbid Tales follows closely on the heels of where Hellhammer left off, with a bit more breadth of influence and mastery of instruments. Like Mercyful Fate before them, Celtic Frost recognized the value of applying doom metal's frigid, repetitive rhythms to the faster – one would hardly say "upbeat" – infrastructure of the extreme metal scene bubbling underground beneath the more traditionalist (read: lucrative) thrash movement.
At War With Satan is not very many people's favorite Venom album. The band definitely deserve credit for taking a huge risk here, making the title track a full blown 20-minute epic that takes up the entire side of a vinyl LP… and it's the first side, mind you! Unfortunately, none of the shorter tracks on side two have gone down in history as pure gold, either, and while not "bad" by any means, the whole treading water aspect of At War With Satan betrays a band that burnt out on new ideas pretty early on.
Like I said earlier, Sodom weren't exactly the biggest go-getters when it came to recording new music in those early days, but even two years removed from their groundbreaking demo, the band still sound ahead of their time on new tunes like "Outbreak of Evil".
Tom Angelripper's vocals here are still closer to the later Norwegian template than anything but Bathory's own Quorthon, and even though Witchhunter's drumming is every bit as simplistic and metronomic as Stephen Priestly's on Morbid Tales, one can hear how a sped up version of this calculated, mechanistic percussion would logically lead to the blastbeat as the overall tempo continued to ratchet upwards over the next few years.
Another band that only briefly had even the loosest of ties to proto-black metal was fellow Germans Destruction, who similarly have had a career trajectory almost entirely circumscribed by classic thrash, but early on – if only through sloppy ineptitude – they definitely left their mark on the blackened extremes of the genre. Vocalist Schmier has obviously taken a cue from Angelripper's throat shredding work on malevolent entries like "Black Mass" off of that year's Sentence of Death EP.
Talk about riding a crest of artistic momentum: 1984 marked the third Mercyful Fate release in as many years, stone cold classics each and every one of them. Don't Break the Oath is the final effort of the original Fate lineup before King Diamond decided to go solo, and it's equally as revered as its predecessor, Melissa. Even though the band's actual music may not rubbed off on the more abrasive Norwegian second wave (Mayhem, Burzum, Darkthrone) it's readily apparent on songs like "Come to the Sabbath" how influential they would be on later, more epic black metal bands in the bottom half of the 90's.
Finally, if any one band deserves credit as the first fully formed black metal band – and not just a mixed blood precursor – it would undoubtedly be Sweden's own Bathory. Masterminded by Thomas Forsberg, a.k.a. Quorthon, Bathory represents the whole package, even when viewed with a quarter century's hindsight: shrieked, barely discernible vocals; cavernous, lo-fi production values; rapid, tremolo-picked riffs that barely hold together; and a foundation of metronomic blastbeats maintaining some semblance of structure.
It's interesting to contrast 1984's self-titled debut with Venom's third album from earlier that year, as Bathory doesn't attempt to disguise the Venom influence, although on tracks like "Sacrifice" Quorthon not only takes the Venom sound to its logical conclusion, but also threatens to render his forebears instantly obsolete in the process.
Having arrived at the first full-fledged example of black metal – minus the church burnings and penchant for other sundry grandy felonies – this seems as good a stopping point as any for this nascent installment in an ongoing series. Next year we'll pick up where Bathory's redefining watershed moment left off and run through to the second wave of Norwegian bands. See you fuckers in 2015.
