Bathory Bathory 1984 (Tyfon)
Black Metal
The diabolical hordes invade our realm.
Verdict
The Bathory debut album certainly belongs in this journal for its historical importance and is largely regarded as the first ‘black metal’ album and would form part of the fledgling ‘first wave of black metal’. The NWOBHM had firmly given the heavy metal genre its own unique identity, thrash metal had then pushed that envelope even further and had thrown metal into unknown waters. This had in turn opened the door to the more extreme metal sub-genres of both black metal and death metal which would shape metal considerably over the coming decades. Black metal would certainly be a phenomenom as far as metal was concerned, as it quickly nominated itself as a European concept rather than a British or American one, but that’s not to say that its roots weren’t in bands such as Venom and Slayer! The European angle though came in the form of bands like Mercyful Fate and even more significantly from Hellhammer who quickly evolved into the better known Celtic Frost (reviews for all these bands) Bathory though fronted by Quorthon would firmly establish the genre in its purest form so far, as in the space of just 26 minutes Bathory would deliver an inspiration for a whole sub-genre. The band formed in Vallingby Sweden were named after the infamous Hungarian countess Elizabeth Bathory (check your history) and were fronted by multi-instrumentalist Quorthon who besides writing all the music and lyrics for the album, covered the vocals and the guitars here too as well as most of the production duties. The album starts off with an almost Black Sabbath style of morbid church bells tolling away in “Storm of Damantion” before the thrashy low-fi “Hades” sets the scene for the rest of the album, of which I find “Necromansy” and “Raise the Dead” the pick of the tracks. The album is also blessed with fantastic lyrics even though a lyric sheet is essential here and it has some great sounding titles like "In Conspiracy with Satan" and the whole thing is a unique bleak ambient experience. Swedish death metal author Daniel Ekeroth descirbes this album as "basically a mix of the satanic party rock of Venom and the energy of San Francisco thrash metal” an analogy that I think pretty much sums up the black tasting recipe here. Another interesting description I also came across stated that this album sounded like Motorhead had actually been to hell and had just ridden back. What’s most significant about this album and early black metal in general (from what I know) that instead of delving into a general satanic past as a lot of other metal bands would do here, is that bands like Bathory instead looked into their own Nordic heritage and its pagan past for their inspiration, Quorthon of course would provide the inspiration for Viking metal as well. This heritage creates a bleak environment combined with a claustrophobic low-fi sound and the album's heavy black based cover presents a forbidden realm of disturbing doom, that does an excellent job of infiltrating the listeners mind more so than any other sub-genre of metal.