2006 is proving to be a big year for a lot of metal re-issues, and I seem to buying as many as I can (as long as I can still pay rent!). With this said, one of my latest discs was this re-issue of Morrigan’s Celts album from 2003. They’re a band hailing from Germany, playing Nordic black metal about the Celts. That’s a combination I cannot ignore.
First a little history as usual. Morrigan started out as Mayhemic Truth in ‘92, playing black/viking metal in the vein of Bathory. Beliar and Balor have always been the core of the group with only two other members in the entirety of both bands (Lilith (Mayhemic Truth) on bass who wrote one of the songs from their ‘94 promotape and Baldur (Morrigan) as the second guitarist) but their sound is that of a fully fleshed out band of four or five people. Now, where do the two bands coincide? In 1997, Balor left the band to persue other interests and the band officially split up with a single release in 1999 officially putting the band to rest. In the summer of 2000, both Balor and Beliar came back together to form Morrigan, a natural continuation of Mayhemic Truth, musically and stylistically. After two releases and some live gigs, we arrive at Celts in 2003 and its re-release by Undercover Records.
Enough history, let’s get to the meat of this review. Celts is a big mix up of music that somehow works. Some songs are slow stoner-doom tracks, others are medium-fast paced black metal but it’s all a mix of old black metal and pagan metal, with splashes of war metal thrown in. Intermixing a genre as volatile as black metal with something that can be as benign as pagan metal is a tough road (as displayed by later period Bathory) since it’s very hard to do both in a single song and have it sound cohesive. The composition of the songs are not typical of a two man band with excellent production giving a lot of depth to the songs. Beliar’s harsh vocals and Balor’s drumming take classic black metal elements and implant them firmly into a pagan metal mold. Using keyboards, flutes and battle chants, Morrigan have long carried on Bathory’s legacy of fusing these two genres into something all their own. After the very ethereal opening track, Celts kicks into gear with “Giants of Stone”. This track is a melt-your-face doom-influenced track with some heavy riffing and excellent ambient work. Beliar’s vocals in the beginning of this song are more of a sung pagan chant than actual “I’m screaming about killing your cat” vocals many are used to with black metal bands but of course this only lasts so long. For most of the eight minutes this track takes, it’s got huge instrumental reprises of the opening guitar work and chanted vocals. With as many layers of sound that this track has, you’ll forget that there are only two men in this band! The next track “Warstained Iron” definitely picks up the tempo of the album with a mid paced classic black metal attack of blastbeats and over distorted guitars. The melody of the song rises and falls constantly with the guitar and culminates in a huge drum solo, backed with a wall of distortion. The vocals are like that of any normal black metal track, dealing with the battles and fall of the Celts.
This feeling and story continues on through the next two tracks, with number five having a short very war metal inspired intro. Track five, “Reappearance”, picks up the pace to mid-fast paced metal. This will be territory more familiar to black metallers, with faster blastbeats and much more upbeat fretwork (and more distortion). Unfortunately, this is where my liking for this release begins to wane. All of the typical black metal tracks are either mid-paced or mid-fast paced and follow a similar formula (intro, fast post-intro, vocal breakdown, post-intro reprise, vocal breakdown, end song). The latter half of the album attempts to break this by adding in more pagan and ambient aspects and does so with some success but I still feel there could have been more variation in the early half of the album. Track number seven “Staring in the Eyes of Chuchullain” harkens back to the stoner/doom feel of “Giants of Stone” but throws in more chanted vocals and defnitely more drum work. I noticed myself nodding my head a number of times to this track unknowingly. The last two minutes or so feel like they were ripped from a pagan album and this really helps to break up the formulaic song structure.
Despite all of this, I still get a lot of enjoyment out of this release, especially since it’s my first experience with Morrigan and it wasn’t sullied so easily. I also bought their newest release Welcome to Samhain but I haven’t cracked the plastic on it yet but I’m sure I will in the next few days. With a good mix of black metal influence and pagan/war elements, one will find this to be a release outside the norm of mainstream. With the heavy professed Bathory influence this is to be expected but is not unwelcomed these days when many releases coming from Europe sound so similar. With almost fifteen years of playing under their belt, Morrigan has definitely solidified their sound into something I find myself listening to more and more as the days go by.
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