Overrated Tales of Speed Metal - "Morbid Tales" Review (13%)
Okay, since you're reading this blog you probably remember "Cold Lake" from this band and basically nothing else - and you probably despise on principle the very existence of the individuals who produced such a shit album.
Well, I'm making this post to inform you that the shit that Celtic Frost made on their debut EP Morbid Tales is almost equally worthless. Drugged-out, droning washes of generic punk rock power chords and light, distant vocals forming a feeble, ocean-like bed of music for stream-of-consciousness rapping to drift over in an equally vain, imprecise manner. Basically, proto-hipster rock applied to hardcore punk/metalcore d-beats creating something utterly worthless, boring and generic, and claiming it to be "influential" to the rising black and death metal scenes when nothing could be further from the truth.
Morbid Tales came out in November 1984, that's AFTER Bathory's debut, after Sodom and Possessed's first few demos, hell, it's even after Slayer's early work, so how exactly can this be influential when it came out after the most important proto-black and death metal and, perhaps more importantly, marks a clear regression towards speed metal when compared to those demos and albums?
All that aside, Morbid Tales is really not something I would choose to listen to beyond mere curiosity or musical scholarship. I have never once said to myself "I feel like listening to Celtic Frost right now" and there's good reason too. In the first place, I'm not a big fan of the way they play extreme metal. Speed metal for the masses, a spoon-fed baby formula of a genre the true innovators of black metal (Bathory, Sodom, Slayer, etc.) were, for better or for worse, trying to leave behind.
Morbid Tales is neither very good, nor very influential. It's closer to Venom than Bathory, and thus closer to speed metal than its logical successor extreme metal.
Overrated Tales of Speed Metal
It seems that in recent years this album has made a shift in popular perception from "that Celtic Frost demo-thing that influenced black metal" to "forgotten old school black metal classic".
Of course, both opinions are dead wrong: Morbid Tales is, at best, average speed metal.
Not black metal. Not death metal. Speed metal.
Why is this distinction important? Because speed metal isn't extreme metal, no matter how hard it tries to be.
Worse, Celtic Frost's music represents a clear regression when compared to the band's predecessor Hellhammer.
When black and death metal bands claim to "influenced by Celtic Frost", like Darkthrone or Marduk, what they usually mean is that they were influenced by Hellhammer's Satanic Rites or Apocalyptic Raids.
Morbid Tales does nothing that the unholy trinity of Bathory, Hellhammer and Hanneman's Slayer hadn't already done better.
Suggesting that this is in any way as important or enduring as the output from the three aforementioned bands is a pretty massive exercise in historical revisionism that probably isn't worth undertaking.
In the end, Morbid Tales is altogether a average-to-good speed metal album that was unfortunately made by ex-members of Hellhammer. Had it been made by any other speed metal band from the same period, this would probably be regarded as a second-tier work from that era of speed metal, nothing more, nothing less.
Morbid Tales is a solid album, but incredibly overrated in the extreme metal scene.
Replace with Demonecromancy for some truly influential blackened death metal.
Morbid Tales score: 13/100.
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