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| I can't wait for my sweet AliExpress t-shirt. |
Recently found a copy of The Return...... for $2. It's a particularly cheap-looking later CD version with uncrisp layout graphics, although I was happy that it had the original LP cover on the back, since my older disc only has a plain tracklist. I don't dislike it, but it's certainly my least favorite out of the first 3 Bathory albums, and even out of the first 5 depending on whether I'm in a Blood Fire Death mood or not.
A few vintage magazine reviews (mostly UK reviews, one of which I'm almost certain was from Metal Forces) referred to this as death metal. Certainly some of this had to do with the unfamiliar waters and nebulous boundaries of the embryonic extreme metal scene, so new as to lack much codification. But since the album is very bestial and even brutal in its approach, I wonder if it partially had to do with trying to describe them in a way that somewhat differentiated them from Venom (ironically, I think "Bestial Lust" is one of the purest examples of Venom worship ever done--if the English in the lyrics was cleaned up a bit and it had the Black Metal production, it would be a Venom track).
I'm far from the first to suggest the idea, but I don't really see The Return...... mentioned much as a foundational influence for all of the bestial black/death and war metal stuff. I remember immediately thinking of aspects of the album's aura and production choices when I heard Bestial Warlust and Blasphemy for the first time, and even some in the Conqueror demo too. At the same time, I also hear production aspects and the relentless approach as an influence in a lot of the faster blastbeat ridden Scandinavian styled black metal (think all the Panzer Division Marduk and Pure Holocaust type stuff), only taken to an unfortunately monotonous extreme (also makes me wonder how much of an influence the second Bathory was on Von's Satanic Blood, since there's a certain trance-like monotony to the simplistic, compact songs, although there it's a positive aspect).
Coincidentally, one of my pet peeves with the album is the weak rerecording of "The Return of the Darkness and Evil." Yes, it has a faster tempo and more "brutal" approach, yet it lacks all the wonderful charismatic touches of the original like the drum intro and the ultra evil reverb drenched vocals. Applied on a much larger scale, these are the same reasons why a lot of the extreme metal scene kind of disinterested me after the late '80s and early '90s--like that new version of "The Return of the Darkness and Evil," it seemed more sterile. And less metal.
