Only Death Is Real: An Illustrated History of Hellhammer and Early Celtic Frost (1981-1985)

Embraced by white text on black, glossy pages that absorb your every faint fingerprint is an indepth, illustrated history of early Celtic Frost and Switzerland's most obscure, metal avatars, Hellhammer. Written by the founders and driven by black, 'Only Death Is Real' takes you along fog-ridden, wooded pathways inside Zurich's backroads and villages where these members once met, shared hair styles, women, guitarists, drummers and rebellious, like-wise ideology. Readers may find themselves entranced and sucked in by the vintage Black & White era, from the photographic stills pressed and printed in this 9 1/2" x 11 1/2" hardback published by Bazillion Points. My copy had arrived finally after the third printing in 2012, and much to my dissatisfaction, was delivered to me dented on the bottom-righthand corner. Instead of overreacting like a self-righteous, spoiled brat collector-type, I opened the pages and began reading instead. I knew that whatever fecal matter from a piss poor, Swiss Punk Rock bar Hellhammer might have endured or found themselves booked and rejected in, that my own barely scarred, self-assurance could easily carry on just as well, with an imperfect, misfit copy. Through more perilous trails of rejection and ridicule from peers, civilians and bosses, Hellhammer stuck it out, and balanced their wage-enslaving labor with thier earliest band practice sessions while identifying themselves with the New Wave of Heavy Metal British acts in the early Eighties over the fading Psychadelic era and increasingly, popular Pop Rock charts emerged at the time. Equipped with bullet belts, studded armbands and 'ambitious ammo', the Author, Tom Gabriel Fischer recounts the earliest impure Celtic Frost songs written, such as, "Detroned Emperor" while the co-author, Martin Eric Ain delves deeper into the perverse, philosophical wicked world, known as history. It is under my own personal opinion, these members had a knack for channeling the underworld and awakening ancient war-like, Dark Age historians in their albums giving birth to an unnamed genre that would prosper in underground metal categroies years later. The harder fans strive to find music no one else has, the more they may all find themselves listening and relating to the infamous, Grave Hill bunker's, Hammerhead, later renamed Hellhammer. Again, what this book does for me on personal level is opens my eyes that not all successful metal bands live a decadent lifetstyle of debauchery and drug use, but surprisingly find ways to separate themselevs by overcoming fear, insecurties and stipulations of society through pure, driven determination to produce thier own, unique artform in order to evade conformity. Although it ends abrupty, this book not only rewrites history, but reenacts it, and deserves a standing oviation from Pompeii to the Roman Theatre in Amman, Jordan.