This re-issue of the classic 1985 album from Celtic Frost has been out for awhile, but I figured we'd make this available here at C-Blast for any newcomers
to the band's genre-defying, frequenty experimental heavy metal that still holds up as some of the heaviest tuneage ever. As far as I'm concerned,
it is. To Mega Therion was the Swiss band's second album, and it marked an important turn in their career that found the Frost implementing a wider
range of sounds and influences into their primal blackened thrash attack. Housed within some spectacular original artwork from H.R. Giger, To
Mega... starts off with the sinister Wagner-esque bombast of "Innocence and Wrath", a brief orchestral doom-dirge of pounding kettle drums and french
horns and grinding distorted guitars, and then the band kicks in with "The Ursurper", total classic Frost, catchy as fuck riffage that moves adeptly from
skull cracking sludginess to up tempo death thrash, complete with singer/guitarist TOm G. Warrior's classic "ugh" death grunts! Classic songs like "Dawn of
Meggido" and "Necromantical Screams" designed the template for the black metal movement that would rise up a few years after this album was released, and the
brutal halftime chug of "Jewel Throne" plants the seeds of pretty much the entire NYC deathcore movement of the early 90's. Obviously, this is essential,
classic stuff, highly influential when it came out, and the experimental spirit behind Celtic Frost makes this album and Into The Pandemonium
utterly prescient and as powerful and crushing and weird today as they were twenty years ago. Nobody in death/thrash metal was doing the fucked up
things that Celtic Frost were doing during this era of metal - just check out the wacked out female vocal accompaniment on "The Ursurper", the orchestral
horns on "Necromantic Screams", the black industrial-ambience of "Tears In A Prophets Dream"...this shit was crucial when it came out, and did much
to bend the minds of hordes of hypercreative young metal freaks like myself. It was with their followup Into The Pandemonium that Celtic Frost
really blasted out into the outer fringes of metal, but this album is just as crucial a marker in their long and strange career, if for no other reason than
it rocks a nonstop feast of apocalyptic megaheavy riffage unequalled in the annals of 80's metal. This re-issue from Noise Records contains a bonus track
entitled "Return to the Eve (1985 Studio Jam)" that appears here for the first time, and comes in a cool package that includes a 16-page booklet with the
original artwork, photos from the era, lyrics, and track notes. Essential.