Getting all my impressions of what the metal scene of today is into from this site and its reviews and forums, there seems to be a really grating trend in the last few years of putting the entire emphasis of appreciation for recent metal releases on production and aesthetics with very little attention paid to what is actually played. I don't know whether it is correlation or causation, but I see the worst examples in the "revival" of old school death metal, where bands like Encoffination can play two-note drones with zero musical content but be likened to the ungodly Incantation based on aesthetics alone, or where lazy fiddlings of random notes drenched in reverb like Chth'whatever are compared to the legendary Demilich without a batting of the eye. But really, I feel the starting point of this disturbing trend to be Celtic Frost's re-imagining of their dreadful Prototype-demo style by simply slowing down the kind of dreck they played on the demo and giving it a huge production and making it all sad and goth and whatever.



I'm really reminded by what a fellow reviewer of the old days once wrote about that new Neurosis album, how they are still playing those huge chords with all the gravity they always had, that crushing weight they exuded with each stroke of the guitar and that suffocating effect of how every monolithic chord slowly rung out, but that that's actually all they were doing anymore, just playing huge, crushing chords, but not playing anything with them. Like getting their entire substance just from playing each chord, but nothing, zero, nada from anything the combination of chords did together. Monotheist is like that. It's huge, crushing chords. The production on this album, the tone of the guitar, it is really fucking huge, and crushing as hell, and each individual chord does sound massive. But never, not at a single point on this album, do these chords ever do anything together, let alone ever form a riff, let alone ever even get within a line of sight (not even if you had the aid of the Hubble) of the riffs you hear on the EPs or debut album. Whatever riffs you want to imagine on Monotheist, it's really the kind of shit they tried on Prototype to dream of baiting Korn and System of a Down fans into the morbid fold. That demo was shelved because it was as pathetic and obvious a "we follow every trend"-circus as Cold Lake, but the idea survived, it was simply reshaped to appear "more Celtic Frost" by changing the aesthetics. Same pitiful style of non-riffs, but re-imagined slower and sadder so the jumpdafuckup won't jump da fuck in your face as much, given a monolithic sound that courts similarities to the legendary Apocalyptic Raids EP and whoosh everyone is happy. You couldn't do the same with a Papa Roach album, because while musically it would be the same if treated to the same aesthetic change, Monotheist succeeds entirely on brand recognition. So the mind of the listener goes from "Oh this is a gothed up nu-metal album" to "Oh Celtic Frost are back with this dark and crushing sound." No, they're not back in any way and you've been tricked by clever marketing.



That to this day this album continues to be confused for metal is mind-boggling in one way, because pretty much every song on here would fit on any Korn/Marilyn Manson collaboration album, but on the other hand it is not surprising at all if I think back of the obsession with production and aesthetics I bemoaned in the opening of this review. If Encoffination sounds like Onward to Golgotha then surely Monotheist is as balls to the wall extreme fucking metal as Morbid Tales, if not more so - the guitars sound heavier after all. Moving past the surface however, there's no way around everything on the album being a mix between nu-metal and modern gothic rock. If you try to recreate the sound of Love Like Blood's (German gothic rock band) Snakekiller album (produced by Peter Tägtgren), and started mixing Roots non-riffs with it at half to two-thirds their speed, you'd have Monotheist in a nutshell. In essence, it's Prototype V2.0, and by extension Cold Lake V3.0, and further proof that no low is low enough for Tom to never stoop to. I am glad that internal band differences put a halt to the mission to conquer MTV and Hot Topic and that Tom at least can't misuse the brand recognition for his quest for a gold plated and diamond encrusted Ferrari and sully the name of one of heavy metal's most iconic legends in the process. And people of the metal world, come to your senses and train your ears to listen for riffs again before letting yourself be fooled by production values and aesthetics. As long as the majority of reviews on this site discuss guitar tones and mastering techniques for 90% of their content and make only passing side-mentions - if any - of what the instruments actually play, I cannot rediscover my faith in our once glorious community to see through this dethroned emperor's lack of clothes, and the empowering of all production/aesthetics-supported fakes riding the wave of being able to claim fame without content by fiddling with the right gears in the studio and polishing it up with the right window dressing. May the false be without entry!