Celtic Frost live at the Fillmore, San Francisco, October 3rd, 2006
Celtic Frost, Sunn O))), Goatwhore, 1349 at The Fillmore, San Francisco,
An Old School Metal-Geek Show Review, With Much Reminiscing
I first saw Celtic Frost during their 1985 tour, when they played shows at the Keystone Palo Alto and The Stone in . They were touring in support of their To Mega Therion album. Voivod and Running Wild opened.
I remember going so apeshit at the show that bassist Martin Ain gave me a free button afterwards. Either Martin Ain or drummer Reed St. Mark told me that they’d been watching me from the stage as I slammed around in the audience. It’s kind of funny that the band were watching me. Isn’t it supposed to be the other way around?
German traditional metal band Running Wild started things off. I owned and liked a couple of their records, but live they struck me as kind of silly. Their newest album at the time was “Branded and Exiled,” and they came out on stage with a large “branding iron” (probably an oversized rubber stamp) and “branded” a piece of paper before flinging it out into the audience. The paper then wafted to the floor like an autumn leaf and remained there untouched. Kind of pathetic, really.
Voivod, on the other hand, were brilliant. Their newest album was “Killing Technology,” and singer Snake came out on stage wearing a gas mask (possibly so he could breathe in the midst of all the stage smoke billowing everywhere…) and nail-spiked wristbands. That seemed pretty cool to my teenaged eyes. Their music at this point in their career was somewhat more refined than their early material (their first album, War and Pain, was described in a review as sounding like “Venom in a cement mixer”) but not quite as strange as later albums.
Celtic Frost performed flawlessly (at least that’s how I remember it) except for some minor technical difficulties. At one point, Reed St. Mark did a drum solo using drumsticks the size of rolling pins. If I remember correctly, he left the drum riser and continued playing anything else in reach. Shades of Moe! Staiano.
Afterwards, after meeting Martin Ain and Reed St. Mark (not sure where Tom Warrior was at this point) we hung out in the parking lot and almost got Snake in trouble when we all pointed to him after a grumpy security guard asked us who owned an illegally parked car. Snake, who didn’t speak English all that well, was somewhat bemused.
This show still stands out in my head as one of the best heavy metal shows I’ve seen.
Fast forward 21 years…
Running Wild now seems to sing almost exclusively about pirates. Voivod guitarist Piggy died of cancer earlier this year, and they’ve recently released their last album using tracks culled from his computer. Celtic Frost have reformed after a long hiatus and given the world the brilliant “Monotheist” album.
I went to the Fillmore by myself because various friends and family were either too busy or had no interest in going. However, I was reasonably certain that I’d run into some familiar faces there.
After driving up and down a few times in search of the parking place least likely to result in finding a little pile of broken glass next to my car when I got back later, I walked to the venue. Once inside, I discovered 1349 in mid-set. With their corpse-painted faces and windmilling hair (mimicked by more than a few audience members) they were somewhat cartoon-like. Their music put them firmly in the black metal camp, with riffs and drums fighting to outpace each other and vocals alternating between a rasp and a shriek. To my ears none of the songs were distinguishable from each other or from loads of similar sounding bands.
The unfortunately named Goatwhore were little better. The music was little chunkier and the vocals a little lower, but no more intelligible (despite the fact that 1349 are from Norway and Goatwhore are from Louisiana ). They also suffered from “indistinguishable song” syndrome.
After Goatwhore, I wandered around in an attempt to find some familiar faces. Upstairs I ran into Al and Matt, who used to be in a band together and now are in two different ones. Al mentioned that he’d seen Umlaut downstairs, so I went off in search of him. Instead, I ran into Devon and ended up talking to him through the entirety of Sunn O)))’s set, which from my distracted vantage point out in the lobby sounded like a single, monotonous, low-end drone. Lots of stage fog and hooded costumes accompanied this, apparently. Umlaut, wearing a Slayer shirt, wandered by and chatted a bit before disappearing towards the merch table (at $25 a shirt, too steep for me). Umlaut and I have been in e-mail contact over the last year or so, but this is the first time I’ve actually seen him since the… I’m not sure… early 90s. Maybe even longer than that. Late 80s? It was good to see him. He looks pretty much the same, which is more than can be said for some other people I ran into. Lots of aging metalheads were in evidence, mingling with kids in their late teens through early 20s.
Before we knew it, the Celtic Frost intro tape (Totengott, from Monotheist – an atmospheric piece with “evil” vocals by Martin Ain) was playing, so we all crowded into the main room. There were huge Celtic Frost banners behind and on each side of the stage – real heavy metal circus type stuff. Tom Warrior appeared wearing a black beanie pulled down to his eyebrows and black makeup accentuating the hollows of his eye sockets. Martin Ain, also in proto-corpse paint, sported a huge beard, which mingled with his hair to give him an ursine appearance. They were joined by new members, Anders Odden on guitars (just for this tour? I don’t know), and Franco Sesa on drums. First up was Procreation (of the Wicked), played REALLY LOUDLY. I wish I’d thought to bring some ear plugs (I’m old enough to actually start worrying about boring things like hearing loss). They followed it up with another song from Morbid Tales, Visions of Mortality, before doing a trio of songs from To Mega Therion, namely Circle of the Tyrants, The Usurper, and Jewel Throne. Tom invited the singer from 1349 (sidenote: Umlaut sez this is in reference to the year the Black Death reached Norway) to take over lead vocals on The Usurper, which, in my opinion, lessened the impact of the song by making it sound more black metal – too much shrieking. Then, a new track, Ain Elohim, appeared, sounding sharper, more focused than the older material. They followed this up by playing my two favorite songs from To Mega Therion back to back – Necromantical Screams (a reworking of the old Hellhammer song, Buried and Forgotten) and Dawn of Meggido. Pure metal geek bliss. They followed this up with Mesmerized, the evening’s only song from the Into the Pandemonium album. It was nice to hear this one live. I would have liked to see them attempt to play some of the other songs from this album, but realized that most of them would have to be radically changed to work in the live format – unless they can find some classical musicians and opera singers willing to tour with them.
From my vantage point under the air conditioner, I had a good view of the pit (you know, people running and lurching in a counter-clockwise circle, more or less in time to the music) and the large pool of water (or alcohol) on the floor. Every couple of minutes, somebody (often the same person several times in a row) would slip in it and go tumbling to the ground – again and again and again. It was like watching one of those little YouTube videos repeating over and over again, lit by the very professional stage lighting of Celtic Frost. I remember being a part of such sideshow moments when I was young.
After Mesmerized, they played Ground, from Monotheist, before returning to their first album, Morbid Tales, with Return to the Eve, Dethroned Emperor, and Into Crypts of Rays.
They ended the evening with the epic fourteen minutes plus of Synagoga Satanae, again from Monotheist. The live version featured a backlit Martin Ain screaming some sort of sermon in German. Interesting.
The lights went up quickly after that. I wonder why there wasn’t an encore. I ran into one more friend from the old days before finding the exit.
A good night out, indeed. It’s hard to compare the 1985 show with the 2006 one. The eighties show had more of an impact on me (and Voivod was better than all of the bands opening for them this time around) but I think this one was probably better. I’ve mellowed out a bit and seen a lot of very different live shows in the intervening years, but this was a very welcome return to the childlike excitement of the old days. Heavy metal is a very potent form of music if it’s done right. Celtic Frost does it right.
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