By the second full-length Celtic Frost album, To Mega Therion, the band was adding orchestral arrangements and operatic vocals to thunderous epics of brutal death metal that led one critic to coin the term 'avant-metal.' But even it didn’t capture the primitive intensity of Morbid Tales, their beloved masterpiece.

Founded by visionary madman Tom Fischer (aka Tom Warrior), Frost could barely play when they began life in Switzerland as Hellhammer in the early Eighties. There has never been, and will probably never again be, a band quite like Celtic Frost. Venom released the even more amazing Black Metal in '82, then rapidly made one bomb after another for the next several years. Nevertheless, Welcome to Hell still holds up as one of the early Eighties’ most over-the-top metal albums. But the truth is Venom comprised three dorks from Northern England who didn't believe any of the shit they wrote, and the amazingly raw sound of their album was more a result of shitty production than any agenda on the band's part.

On the surface, this first Venom album was positively frightening it looked and sounded as evil as our parents envisioned rock music to be. Venom came out of the starting gate with many of the elements that formed the template for death metal to come: fast, punk-style tempos, a raw, brutal guitar sound, harsh vocals and a sense of foreboding amplified by the band's unrelenting obsession with writing about Satan. If there is a granddaddy of death metal, this album could be it. VENOM- Welcome to Hell (Neat Records, 1981) By Don Kaye, Jeff Kitts and Ula Gehret (Reprinted from Guitar School, April 1996) No matter what, the genre has left us with a number of albums that define the parameters of one of the few kinds of rock and roll left that will definitely still annoy your parents. Other bands have broken out of the death metal ghetto and continue to flourish-Sepultura being a prime example. That's why there aren’t too many quality death metal albums being released nowadays and why the genre has reverted to mostly underground status. Of course, some bands took the genre to ridiculous extremes, while others refused to progress. Death metal shied away from traditional hooks or melodies it was simply an explosion of raw power and crushing heaviness. So the tempos got quicker, the riffs got darker and more brutal, and the vocals got hoarser, more guttural, until they resembled screaming animals instead of anything remotely human. But some hardcore fans and bands wanted something even heavier, faster, and uglier they wanted metal taken to the very extreme. Thrash metal bands, like Exodus, Slayer and Metallica, while consistently heavy, always kept a steady stream of melody running through their music. So where did death metal come from? It was a natural-or unnatural, if you prefer-offshoot of the thrash/power metal scene, itself sired by the punk and New Wave of British Heavy Metal explosions of the late Seventies.

Top 10 deathmetal