I have a couple questions about this iconic band; and I'm wondering if anyone knows.

First of all, whats the deal with the "Temple of Depression" single that came out in 2017? Was this an unreleased track from an earlier session? Or a limited edition bonus track that was only on certain pressings of "Monothist" (I don't have that song on my copy.) This track isn't on any other release (That I know of) and there doesn't seem to be too much information about it.

Also, a lineup question: This may be more of one for the staff (so I apologize if I'm out of line by asking here.) Back in the mid-80s, right around the time "Into the Pandemonium" came out, the band announced they had hired a second guitarist named Ron Marks. This was reported in the media- "Metal Maniacs" and "Metal Forces" for example even ran pictures of him in the lineup. Would have been around 1987 or early 1988. However his name does not appear anywhere in the lineup listing. He was in the band for maybe a year or so before they basically split up right before "Cold Lake" came out- Tom hired Oliver Amberg to replace him essentially.

So, should he be added to the band line-up on their page? Or not, since he never actually appeared on any recordings, and might or might not have ever played live with them- I don't know what the exact policy is on that as far as adding "official" band members to the band page, or if a report needs to be filed or something.

Temple of Depression was a bonus track on some versions of Monotheist, recorded in the same session.

Ron Marks joined the band shortly before the release of "Into the Pandemonium" and toured with them during 1987, before leaving around the time the band spun off into the Cold Lake incarnation. He was a guest on "Vanity/Nemesis" as well, playing guitar on a bunch of tracks in addition to CVB and TGW. I guess he's not listed as a band member on MA because he joined them as a live member. I'm not sure, that's up to interpretation.

Actually, even though I'm a long time Celtic Frost and Hellhammer fan I do have one question:

Are we supposed to pronounce "Celtic" the way the word is really pronounced, with a "c" sound at the beginning, like when you'd speak of the Celts, like "Keltic"?

Or are we supposed to pronounce it the totally retarded incorrect way the basketball team "The Celtics" pronounce it with an "S" sound, like "Seltic"?

I still remember being about 17 years old and having heard of them and I was in a record store looking for one of their albums cause I didn't have any at the time (actually that day I bought my first Venom album "Welcome To Hell" and my first Diamond Head album "Lightning to the Nations)...

anyways...yeah, so I was looking for one of their albums and asked the guy working there if they had any and pronounced their name with a "C" sound, like you are supposed to pronounce it, like "Keltic", and the guy said they didn't have any of their albums and that "the right way to pronounce it is with a "S" sound like "Seltic".

Ever since then I've thought that's how the band wants it pronounced so for like 20 years I've pronounced it with dumb "S" sound, but always feeling like it would be better if they pronounced it properly LOL.

Do Celtic Frost really want us pronouncing their name wrong with an "S" sound?

I recall an interview with Tom G. Warrior in which the interviewer pronounced it with an 'S' sound, but I'm not sure if I've heard Warrior (or any other bandmember) say the name themselves. Just now, I Googled it and when asked Warrior gave this response:

S.O.D. pronounce it "Seltic Frost" in the song "Celtic Frosted Flakes" which always sounded wrong to me. Glad to be vindicated.

I'm glad I can now finally pronounce it "Keltic" and be right about it and realize that guy was just a moron LOL.

Leave it to us Americans to fuck up language and pronounce things wrong and think their way of speaking is the right way when usually it isn't.

Man, I tutor English as a Second Language for a living and last night I was in an ESL course (trying to up my education to improve my position) and my teacher told a joke I thought was apt:

"What do you call someone who speaks 3 languages"

"Trilingual"

"What do you call someone who speaks 2 languages"?

"Bi-lingual"

"What do you call someone who speaks one language?"

"American"

Haha, man, I might be American but we have some dumb ass views of language. I saw another video other day where dumb ass Trump is like "in America we don't speak Spanish we speak English!"

I hate Trump.

I digress, but yeah, I'm glad I was always right about this and can pronounce it the right way.

I mean what the hell is a "Selt" anyway?

There's no context I know of where it's right.

Off topic, but I've read this interview before and I can't get over how he slips out that he's a big Limp Bizkit fan . Especially after criticizing the In Memory of Celtic Frost CD which had Grave, Cianide, and Morgion, among others...these days, he's so opinionated and will literally go out of his way to bully bands he tours with just because he hates their music (At the Gates, Alestorm, etc.) or simply blast them on social media without any provocation (Eluveitie)...maybe a Triptykon/Limp Bizkit tour is a possibility?

Thanks for the info (Zodijackyl) above. I personally would have listed Ron Marks as a former band member (rather than just a session player, like for example Bob Rock filling in at bass for Metallica) but that is up to the staff.

It does seem odd that Tom Warrior is a Limp BIzkit fan but I have always suspected that he always had rather, shall we say, debatable musical tastes alongside of the music he is known for. I remember at one point he recorded a demo, which was really more or less a solo project under the "Celtic Frost" name than a real band project, that had a lot of hip hop and pop-industrial type stuff instead of typical Celtic Frost output. I heard a couple tracks off of this and they really were...not very good, lets just say (maybe some of you industrial hip hop guys will like it though.)

It's one thing to not like another band's music, and I can see wanting to tour with bands whose music you like vs. bands you don't like. But to be a total dick to them...? That's odd. I mean, if my band was stuck touring with, say, Meshuggah, I would still be polite to them, even though I probably wouldn't want to stick around and have to listen to their set every night.

I always thought it was 'Ssseltic phrost,' for what its worth, but whatever.

Does anyone know what some of Tom G. Warrior and Celtic Frost and Hellhammer in general had as influences for their music, especially early on?

I recently started getting more into Christian Death and when I heard some of the singers vocals on their first album I heard some similarities Tom's style and I think it's very likely that they as well as possibly some other early Goth rock bands could have influenced Celtic Frost.

That first Christian Death album came out in 1981 so the time frame would have fit for them to be something he could have recently heard before releasing the first stuff with Hellhammer around 83' and the first stuff with Celtic Frost around 84'.

Two reasons:

1. Jealousy
2. Easy target

Eluveitie sucks balls, but unlike him they are nice & down to earth people and would never fight back. No surprise since they are Christians pretending to be Pagans. TGW is pussy and would never dare calling out a band where he would have to expect a beating of his ugly ass on the streets of Nürensdorf or Zürich.

My copy of Monotheist is a first press digipack with slipcase, and indeed Temple of Depression is a bonus track for this version. Not sure if the exclusive single is the same version; just putting it out on its own like that seems a bit redundant to me, but to each their own.

I must say that while the "keltic" pronunciation makes quite a bit of sense ethymologically, it always sounded so awkward and unnatural to me. Yes, English pronunciation is a total crapshoot as a whole, but some features are more consistent than others, and you don't ever say "kellar" or "keremony" or "kelebration" and so on; "keltic" is just so out of the left field that I often find myself reading it as "seltic" purely out of habit.
What makes it even weirder for me is that in my native languege (Italian) c+e never produces a hard k sound - case in point, the first c in "celtico" sounds like the "ch" in "chair", while it's the second one that is pronounced "k".

I am not a linguist, but it is my understanding that 'Seltic' and 'Keltic' are both accurate ways of pronouncing 'Celtic'. It was the German influence on Gaelic culture that led to the pronunciation of 'Keltic', whereas the more traditional Irish/Scottish pronunciation is 'Seltic'. Thus, you have the Boston 'Seltics' and the Scottish football club 'Seltic F.C.', while the Swiss heavy metal band refers to themselves as 'Keltic Frost'.

tons of extremely common 'c' words are pronounced as 'k' tho', like can, cost, care, cunt, could, ect.

What other words that have an E after the C ?

Venom seems to be the major influence for HH. And they have mentioned Christian Death, and other goth rock, as an influence on CF.

Off topic, but in the Italian language, what's the difference in pronunciation between 'c' and 'cc'?

The Christian Death influence didn't really manifest itself until "Into the Pandemonium" though. They may have always been fans of the band but I don't really hear the influence on "To Mega Therion" or "Morbid Tales"- however Into the Pandemonium has a lot of that sort of goth rock influence.

Thanks for pointing this out, Oxenkiller. We now list Ron Marks as a band member.

That's indeed what I meant; perhaps I should have worded it more clearly.



That's what I've always known as well; both pronunciations are accepted, with "keltic" originating for the Germanic side and "seltic" from the French/Gaulish side. I was surprised, years ago, to see this referred to as a British vs. American English thing; perhaps it has evolved into that, but the pronunciation ambiguity goes way, way further back.



Italian double consonants are a pain in the ass to describe to non-native speakers as they're pretty different to how they sound like in other languages, in fact they're one of the very few things that could be described as tricky when it comes to pronouncing Italian (almost everything is read exactly as it is written, with only a small handful of basic rules to keep in mind).

This page has some helpful tips: http://www.italianlanguageguide.com/pronunciation/consonants/double-consonants.asp

And you can hear some words in this video, which explains the whole thing pretty well: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JaDvhdxoJ90

Thanks for the links, I think I get the gist of it.

The general rule is "s" before front vowel (e, i) and "k" before back vowel (a, o, u).

Cheers; foreign languages are one of my main interests, and it's always interesting for me to approach Italian from a foreigner's point of view.



Yeah, that's what I meant. It's actually the same in Italian, except the c never becomes an "s"; instead it sounds like the "ch" in "choose" before e and i.
"G" is a similar case: before a,o and u it sounds like the hard "g" in "get", but before e or i it's like the "j" in "jet".

This is why "keltic" feels super wrong to me, even though I know it's correct.

I'm not sure about this "Germanic influence" argument, Lord Jotun. The only Celtic language where I've ever encountered a C pronounced as S, is Cornish. And in a roundabout way, Breton, which has adopted saying "ch" as "sh" in some cases. These two languages, compared to the Gaelic branch and even Welsh, are/were historically more isolated from the Germanic (Anglo-Saxon, then later Norman) migrations.

So I lean toward attributing the "seltic" thing entirely to modern English.

You would be very correct. He talks about his appreciation for gothic music and other favorite styles in this interview.

[quote][/quote] Only Death Is Real...

The major influences for Hellhammer/Celtic Frost that I've heard are Black Sabbath, Angel Witch, and (particularly) Venom. Tom cites Vol. 4 as being a key musical influence, along with the In League With Satan single. I'm not familiar at all with goth rock, so I can't speak to any influences there, and he's spoken positively of Prince before.

Personally, I've always pronounced their name as "keltik." This is probably because the "seltik" pronunciation isn't something I ever grew up hearing in California, and I don't think I've ever heard anyone say "selt" to refer to the ancient European ethnic community.

I'm not familiar with Celtic languages at all so first off thanks for the interesting details!
What I meant by Germanic influence was the hard k sound (to this day the German word for "Celt" is "Kelte"), considering English is a Germanic language after all. The "palatalization or assibilation before certain vowels seem to be more of a Latin/romance thing, and c+e resulting in "s" is typical of French, a language which had a ton of influence on other European languages, either romance or otherwise.

I seem to remember an interview with Martin Eric Ain where he mentioned The Cure, Joy Division, Christian Death, Siouxsie and the Banshees and the Sisters of Mercy as influences.

Soccer, sceptic (British spelling of skeptic), synced, and there's probably a handful more cases--but yes, it's extremely uncommon in English.

Oh good lord I forgot about English For the Germans though, it's possible they borrowed the term "Kelte" from the Greek "Keltoi" which meant "tall ones". Whether that referred to the Celtic peoples, or to our preference for a tall can of beer, I can't be sure.

So, an irrelevant question but it is something I have been pondering on for quite some time. Under which genre does the band's early period fall into in your opinion? MA lists them as Thrash/Death/Black Metal; rateyourmusic.com files albums such as Morbid Tales and To Mega Therion under
Thrash Metal (with the Black/Death/Doom Metal tags being supplementary suggestions). I know genre does not really matter, but I am curious as to what the consensus is on that? Personally, I find the term Blackened Thrash metal to be quite apt.

The whole "Martin Ain was an American" stuff on MA is just bullshit: He was just born there, probably while his parents where on holiday or business overseas. He never lived there, but comes from a very wealthy Swiss family and grew up in the same rural area around Zürich. This is only because Tom Warrior wanted to appear "international" in the late 80s and 90s, because he always feels bullied by Swiss society and wanted to make CF an "American" band, because of Reed St. Mark, the Ain-connection and because he was married to an American groupie for some years (lol). Fact is they were never an American band, only in their wet dreams.

i'd say the tag here of thrash/death/black suits well, as i feel they have a fairly even balance of those sounds - which is partly why they're such a huge influence on so many bands in both death- and black metal

I'd say it fits too; they played in a time when the various extreme subgenres had not separated completely yet, and were a pioneering force in pretty much all of them.

I have a difficult time spotting the death metal elements in their sound though. Was the label put because of their future influence on death metal?

Its officially pronounced Keltic even tho Tom has pronounced it as Seltic on occasion.

No, because they invented the term (at the same time as Possessed):

i dont think there is much thrash in CF at all, vanity/nemesis got some moments like american thrash but thats really it. Mostly proto extreme metal with speed metal and punk.

This. People who say CF is thrash drive me fucking nuts. Like they have no concept of black or death metal.

I associate Celtic Frost too much with slow grinds like Procreation or Jewel Throne to think of them as thrash in any way. Hell, it's closer to doom than thrash in my eyes.

Black metal is probably the most appropriate genre tags, but Celtic Frost is all of their attributions yet also none of them. Celtic Frost just is.

Weren't Celtic Frost also pretty much universally despised by the thrash scene (besides Anthrax)? I saw an interview with Kerry King where the interviewer handed him a copy of 'Morbid Tales' to see his opinion on it, and King snatched it out of his hand and threw it across the room without saying anything .

I've always described Celtic Frost as 'death metal' more than anything else, simply because Obituary are universally considered death metal and their entire sound is basically a slightly meatier and harsher version of Frost.