Hey! You! Do you like Celtic Frost? No, not the modern Tom G. Warrior in a beany hat doom stuff, but the old, old stuff? You know, the “URGH”-laden Morbid Tales of yore, before the synthesisers, Mexican Radios and all that jazz. Damn right you do. You know why? Because Morbid Tales and Emperor’s Return are still, to this day, sat right at the sweet spot of a band who know how to knock up a good tune, but don’t quite know how they’re doing it. Naive, brutal genius.

What if I told you that HellFrost and Fire are channelling this filthy, necrotic riff-laden primitive approach to extreme metal and covering it in lots of lovely death metal vibes? Would you be excited? Well, you should be. Right off the bat, “Fire, Frost and Hell” is a hell of an album. Of course, you know that there is going to be a certain level of quality when Mr Dave Ingram (he of Benediction and Ex-Bolt Thrower, as well as 9000 Rogga side-projects) is involved, and his oldschool delivery is just what the doctor ordered for an album of this nature.

This is really about the guitar riffs though. Those sickening, string-bending, sliding power chords that bring to mind the Swiss atavists. Even the aesthetic of the album over brings to mind Morbid Tales. When the groove locks in tight, and the “UGH” death grunt occurs, it’s a matter of pure magic. “The Lost King and the Heir Apparent”, for instance, has all the infectious mid-tempo chug that you’re ever likely to need, while Dave gives us some hoarse bellowing about some unpleasant stuff. I mean, I have really no idea what on earth he’s on about, but in that respect it really pays homage to its source material!

Hats off to Kunal over at Transcending Obscurity though, because there are also about a million ways in which you can get a hold of this thing. So sure, you could stream it in time through all your favourite services, or buy it from Bandcamp, but you can also buy this in all manner of physical ways – my personal favourite being the Wooden CD box version, which comes with all manner of goodies including UV printed material, a bottle opener, a transparent car-sticker…the whole shaboodle.

Yet all of this frippery would be pointless if this is a dog an album It isn’t just a Celtic Frost tribute album – it’s taken the blue print taken by Morbid Tales (easily one of my ten favourite albums of all time) and expanded on it. If you liked Usurper or Scepter and thought, “yeah, this is ok, but just not death-metal enough”, then Hellfrost and Fire are going to be you. It’s a low-end occultist playing primitive death metal jamboree. Every song is packed with an absolute embarrassment of rich riffery, while the low-end rumble of the rhythm section are war drums by which the be-studded denim-clad legions, clutching their mum’s wood hatchets, could march.

Fantastic, fantastic stuff chaps.

(9/10 Chris Davison)

https://www.facebook.com/HellfrostAndFire

https://hellfrostandfire.bandcamp.com/album/fire-frost-and-hell-death-metal