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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