Bathory: Bathory - 1984
Picking my favorite Bathory album is like picking your favorite child...it's always gonna be the first one. It's still a hard choice but this album, along with
Reign In Blood, was my introduction to extreme metal. Pretty much from the first time I heard the opening chords of "Hades" I worshiped the ground this band walked on and I still do. Funny thing was that I was a thirteen/fourteen year old who had avoided listening to music for the most part for most of my life (I didn't even know who Nirvana were until middle school) and I had no real concept of what made a band sound "dated" so they were just as "relevant" to me as anything. Might just be the reason why I came to love eighties metal as much as I did. But anyhoo...
This is also the most obvious choice for this thread. It's Bathory's ugliest, dirtiest, and most primitive album. Like Hellhammer and Venom this isn't much more than hardcore punk with metal riffs and abysmal production. The big hardcore influence gives this an energy that is totally infectious and, along with the monster riffs, makes this simple, catchy, and heavy as sin. Lyrically these dudes are also the same as either of the other two: Satan, Satan, Satan, and more Satan. In other words: fun, fun, fun, and more fun. Of course the album cover should have told you that in the first place. Does anything say badass Satanic metal quite like a black and white goat head with glowing red eyes on a black background under a logo with Old English font? I think not.
And I don't know about anyone else but I think Quorthon's vocals were pretty much the first time honest-to-god extreme metal vocals were used on record. Cronos and Tom Warrior had used some proto-growls in their respective bands, but neither of them had quite that same level of distorted ugliness to their voices. Yet you can still understand what he's saying for the most part, so the Satan, Satan, Satan, and more Satan is there for all to hear in all of its cheesy glory.
But of course I couldn't leave without mentioning the production. In the immortal words of Nigel Tufnel it is "none more black". I've heard it said that such-and-such album sounds like it was recorded in a garage, but this actually was recorded in a garage. On a tape recorder. Kvlt as ****. Yet even with the ****ty production they manage to get one of my favorite guitar sounds of all time. That buzzsaw guitar is simply perfect. Like as in "OMG OMG OMG!!!" kind of perfect.
RIP Quorthon. Too bad he was a racist.
