MetalSucks

After Celtic Frost’s Collapse, Tom Gabriel Fischer Hopes for a Drama-Free Third Act

As the visionary and front man of Hellhammer, Celtic Frost, and now Triptykon, Thomas Gabriel Fischer – the artist formerly known as Tom G. Warrior – has had his ups and downs. But the hipsters never got their dirty hands on him.

Emo kids do not wear ironic Celtic Frost shirts. Rivers Cuomo hasn’t name-checked the band in a smash single. After 23 years, the avant-garde metal band was an still an underground phenomenon – even though it was on a serious upswing — when they imploded after 2006’s Monotheist. That critically hailed album continued Fischer’s long tradition of mixing blacker-than-midnight extreme metal with unpredictable, sophisticated elements, like the all-strings instrumental “Winter (Requiem, Chapter Three: Finale).”

Celtic Frost went out on top, no doubt. It might be the most respected iconic metal band from the ‘80s. It’s definitely not the most popular act — but unlike Metallica, Slayer, and Megadeth, the group doesn’t have a countless contingent of full-time haters.

Granted, Frost made some missteps, real and perceived. 1988’s Cold Lake, the band’s major-label debut, is the heaviest hair-metal album ever recorded. Some fans flinched at experiments from the tail end of the decade, like a French spoken-word piece (“Tristesses de la Lune”), a rap interlude (“Human II”), and a techno track (“One in Our Pride”). But the seminal band helped make corpse paint and symphonic metal part of the extreme-music playbook. They ripped shit up, too, but it drove Fischer nuts when writers tried to classify Frost as part of the thrash movement.

Celtic Frost has few critics more frank than Fischer himself. The singer-guitarist wrote most of the lyrics and music, and was the only member of the band to appear on every release. He spent over three years making sure Monotheist was a worthy continuation of the Celtic Frost legacy. The tour should have been a victory lap, but it turned into a death march. Simmering tensions between Fischer and cofounder-bassist Martin Eric Ain came to a head on the road, and Warrior quit his own band in April 2008.

“I once made the mistake to continue Celtic Frost without Martin,” Fischer recently explained on the Triptykon forum. “It wasn’t Celtic Frost, in spite of the name, and the results were stunningly pitiful (to put it nicely). I will not repeat that mistake…. In 2005, Martin and I also signed an agreement which prohibits either one of us to continue as Celtic Frost without the other one.”

In short order, Fischer announced the formation of Triptykon, which he promised would “sound as close to Celtic Frost as is humanly possible.” Tracks from the band’s debut have been emerging over the last few month, and Eparistera Daimones will arrive in the States this Tuesday, March 23. Fischer and company make good on his promise.

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Thanks: kenchan13

So I’ve been living in the UK for about four months now, and have managed to take in quite a lot of this “culture” thing they’re so fond of over here. I’ve been to nine countries, eight major metal festivals, and a handful of cities in Ol’ Blighty itself; I’ve gate-crashed hotel parties in Norway with the drummer of Swallow the Sun, stage-dived into a sea of muddy grind freaks in the Czech Republic, gotten roaring drunk with Wolves in the Throne Room in the Netherlands, met Gaahl’s boyfriend in France, gotten lost in Rome, watched Electric Wizard blow an amp in Manchester, lost my mind to Eyehategod at Hellfest, seen Manowar (‘nuff said there) – and that was just the first couple months. Between all the metal, mud, bruises, whiskey, calimocho, hard cider, and terrifying Czech liquor (Becherovka and Fernet are no fucking joke, even if it is Kevin Sharp and Danny Herrera pouring you a shot), I realized that, somehow, something was still missing.

To my immense chagrin, I had yet to take that all-too-necessary pilgrimage up through the Black Country and into the Unholy Land itself – to Birmingham, England. Every metaller worth his leather (and several million other music fans besides) knows exactly why this unimpressive, coal-smudged city matters so much. Birmingham is the ancestral home of heavy metal. Everything – whether it be doom, black metal, powerviolence, or even the plague that is deathcore – everything came from here. The famed Mermaid Pub provided a fertile breeding ground for extreme metal, nestled as it was in a dodgy part of town where the cops ignored the punkers and longhairs milling around out front as the early rumblings of a deadly new sound thundered away upstairs The city itself was the original stomping ground of the dirty sexy hard rock’n’roll of Led Zeppelin, the NWOBHM gods in Judas Priest, the crusty proto-grind of Sore Throat, the scummy grindcore forefathers of Napalm Death, the industrial noise terror of Godflesh, and the one and only BLACK FUCKING SABBATH.

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While Anthrax, Testament, Heaven and Hell and motherfucking Motorhead are among the most anticipated bands that metal pilgrims are converging on western Germany to see, it would appear that my favored people, those crafty Norwegians, also have a few things planned for the mayhem. While Enslaved will be appearing (and hopefully represented on a good stage, because you know they fucking deserve it) some others are teaming up with foreigners in combinations that are hard to ignore.

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