Mercyful Fate - Dark Metal from Denmark

In 1981, saying metal meant saying "New Wave Of British Heavy Metal"; and the term "new wave" in rock music is used, in practice, every time someone comes along within a given strand to upend it, to create a sub-strand within the strand, or to declare the death of one and the birth of another. Mercyful Fate, in the metal field, are among the very few who can claim the merit of having given rise to a new wave.

It's the third of the four "new waves" of metal: 1. late 60s – early 70s (hard rock from Deep Purple, Black Sabbath); 2. late 70s – early 80s (NWOBHM: Motorhead, Judas Priest, Iron Maiden, Diamond Head); 3. first half of the 80s (heavy metal: speed-thrash of Metallica; dark/black of Venom, power-black of Mercyful Fate, power-epic of Manowar); 4. late 80s – early 90s (heavy metal: power: Helloween; black: Bathory; stoner: Melvins; doom-dark: Celtic Frost and Candlemass; death: Death; grind: Napalm Death; gothic: Paradise Lost). Heavy metal, i.e. the step after NWOBHM (metal), i.e. thrash and speed, had three parallel flashpoints: the first within NWOBHM itself, namely Venom; the second in California, Metallica; the third in Denmark, Mercyful Fate. The transition from metal (NWOBHM) to pure heavy (speed and thrash) is owed exclusively to Metallica. However, Venom and Mercyful Fate (like Manowar) set the blueprint for all the heavy variants of the fourth new wave; and they did so without being, strictly speaking, heavy: without knowing thrash and speed (without knowing, in short, hardcore). The variant that Mercyful Fate (like Manowar) would inspire and practice is power; the way of conceiving it is (like Venom) black.

Mercyful Fate inaugurate Nordic metal (something of an answer to what to do amid the snow and the void, now literally landscape-bound rather than an expressionistic deduction from the all-metropolitan), the most extreme strand, in form and content, the most uncompromising and long-lived, nowadays the most populous, of metal as a whole (formally, Nordic metal today is either black/death or progressive: Mercyful Fate played power). Venom and Mercyful Fate push the satanism of Black Sabbath to a pathological (or folkloric) extreme. Venom and Mercyful Fate are not nihilists: quite the opposite, they are obsessively believers, just on the wrong side. Or rather: to hide the classic "existential void" they build spectral and phantasmagoric papier-mâché friend-enemies with which to then self-induce suggestion; so as to be able, in the end, to take it out on someone who, however elusive, however invisible, remains in any case less unintelligible than society or the cosmos. Venom and Mercyful Fate use the doom and the vocabulary of Black Sabbath (Satan, evil, sadomasochistic sex, witches) but carry them with the power of Motorhead.

The result shows just how fundamental these four bands are to the genre. Mercyful Fate are King Diamond, at the time a twenty-year-old (though, like all megalomaniacs, he seems ageless) showman given to the most grandiloquent satanic and sadomasochistic theatrics. He wore, and still wears, makeup like Alice Cooper and Kiss, but for purposes inseparable from a fetishistic, paranormal, sorcery-obsessed mania. His microphone stand was, and still is, held up by two bones passed off as human. Séances, orgies, epileptic fits, necrophilia, persecution complexes nevertheless fail (even in the eyes of the man himself) to mask an underlying genuine existential malaise which, regardless of how it manifests, aspires to a universal dimension. The fear of the afterlife proves once again to be a fear of this life; or at least an allegory and an attempt to explain its meaning (because the lack of such meaning is the real taboo, a taboo which, in order to confront it, Diamond chose satanic metal instead of, say, a football team or a career in banking). To the character's credit is a substantial and transparent sincerity, despite the thick stage makeup; and it's an entirely human and humane spirit of emotion, a spirit that the trappings of more or less tragicomic, legally actionable or ridiculous actions never manage to fully dislodge.

On this foundation, on this truth, Mercyful Fate, however satanic, however clownish, however ragged and delinquent, are worthy of consideration and stand as one of the fundamental peaks in the history of metal. Their impressionism has pretensions to objectivism. Unlike so many of their insipid epigones (and nowadays the names are legion), not even worth a yawn. Mercyful Fate (joined, for an all-Danish band, by their ever-faithful producer Henrik Lund, a man whose first calling was jazz) were also professional musicians of few words and plenty of substance, the kind of rockers you certainly don't see anymore (their style was the perfect compromise, achieved via symphonic means, between Black Sabbath for the doom, Motorhead for the heaviness and Judas Priest for the speed); guitars: Michael Denner and Hank Shermann; bass: Timi Grabber; drums: Kim Ruzz. On vocals, obviously, King Diamond. First of all, it was a voice never heard before: perpetually in a falsetto in which he finds himself perfectly at ease, alternating with a deliberately hoarse tone expressing now maladjustment, now menace: the two tones converse, like verse and chorus, simultaneously and always at a rush, like threat and threatened; within a context stifled by the mortuary, where the overcoming of the life-death opposition is already taken for granted and all that remains is the choice of how to die, facing forward or from behind. Somewhere between Robert Halford of Judas Priest (for the unmatched high notes), Ozzy Osbourne (for the bewitching charisma) and Venom's Cronos (with him, truly among the forerunners of black and death metal snarls).

It is, in any case, the falsetto — swirling, expressive, metaphysical (and there is a metaphysics of good as well as one of evil), dreamlike, childlike (yet miles away from Geddy Lee of Rush: as Heaven is from Hell), above all Mephistophelian — that is the dominant trait of a performer whose technique rivals that of Ronnie James Dio. This falsetto is truly the distinguishing mark of Mercyful Fate: because it strikes and strikes itself, it does harm by harming itself and, ultimately, cancels out the opposites in a no man's land of still, motionless laceration, a silent scream and invisible pain. A child demon. A fantasy Middle Ages set in the present, or viewed with the awareness of the present; like unreality (the ritual) coupled with the acknowledgment of the urgency of its opposite, something that lends sincerity to both rather than robbing them of it.

In 1983 the first album, Melissa, would remain their classic: it's already mature, already technically remarkable, guitars, bass and drums have already found that fluid rapport which, conversing in a sublime mediocrity, leaves all the room for the emergence — indeed the dominance — of Diamond's voice; but above all Melissa is visceral, hyper-communicative and atmospheric. All mask, all sincerity: not out of a passion for the mask itself, but for its use in expressing the latter. In 1983, in the rock field, a band and a singer like this had never been seen before. It is a true new wave: with this record, Mercyful Fate and King Diamond already lay out everything they have to say; afterwards, it would be a matter of variations on the theme, of deepening, of refining: and let this not be said to diminish them, quite the opposite — given the results, it's the kind of coherence and perseverance that deserves praise. Melissa is, like every one of Diamond's works, neither a concept album nor a songbook, but a ritual, a single ritual, perhaps made up of different phases. In the present ritual (a ritual "witnessed," not "practiced") lasting 40 minutes, there are seven phases. "Evil" (4'30") immediately presents the darkest Black Sabbath filtered through the speed of Judas Priest, the structures of Diamond Head and the power of Motorhead; over this substrate, Diamond's operatic-Gregorian-perverted voice. The band consciously returns to the primal essence of rock 'n' roll: the vocal passage is followed by the guitar solo, which during the former instead accompanies more or less in the background: and this is not proof of naivety, but of awareness, and sincerity, of expressive urgency.

The lack of simultaneous overlap between voice (singing) and instruments (playing) serves to highlight both of them; and there's every reason for this emphasis, since we're dealing with a voice that is unique and (however many have tried) unmatchable, and with instrumentalists who are almost as singular, drawing on metal's deepest roots while offering something wildly different (as different as black from white) from their contemporaries Iron Maiden: theirs is a doom-Motorhead sound with Judas Priest-style scales. The track also finds room for a couple of riffs (meaning riff in the eminently hard-rock sense, far from heavy-metal clamor) that would remain etched (also thanks to Metallica's cover revivals) into the history of the genre. "Course of the Pharaon" (3'50") shows off the full seductive power of Mercyful Fate, who steep in their doom sound instrumental passages that in other hands might seem almost predictable: just as Diamond does with the lyrics (formulas of a private sorcery) he sings. The rhythm section (rhythm guitar included) handles the doom, the heaviness; while, with their distinctive flourishes and gilded touches, the lead guitar's flights (though the two guitarists are always trading off in a perpetual dialogue) are the counterpart to Diamond's vocal transcendence in falsetto, as opposed to the hoarse rasp of the verses. "Into the Coven" (5') opens with two solos: a medieval acoustic one immediately disowned by a guitar phrase that now seems to bitterly mock it, now to pity it with feeling; the rest of the band's entrance is, in its grief-stricken way, deeply moving.

So Diamond returns to the ruin of his falsetto, with a device that could formally almost be called rap (the verse chewed out hoarsely, dark, then raised an octave higher into falsetto, an eldorado): except there's no catchy hook, deliberately shunned from the outset and all the more refined precisely because it's experienced as something emerging out of chaos (a chaos of classical geometries, no less). "At the Sound of the Bell" (5') might seem predictable, before the arrival of possessed, touching screams (a blend of fantasy and reality), demonic and godless, sadistic and masochistic. Yet another string of instrumental passages that, having become classics, only twenty years later seem predictable (hence their importance: only what is truly essential can earn the label "predictable"). More than human, Diamond comes across as a Luciferian feline, but a wholly spiritual, not figurative, Lucifer: in effect Diamond tries to convey the idea of the outer limits of the human. As if his voice, having broken the sound barrier, remained suspended there, motionless. The instruments now act as fanfare, now as a shadowy accompaniment.

"Black Funeral" is the Nordic take on a thoroughly Black Sabbath-like theme: orchestration, solos, feedback, mournful sneers, voices in excelsis Dei. Given its two and a half minutes, it could well be Mercyful Fate's most significant statement. "Satan's Fall" is the extra-extended version of the previous track, and indeed the band's absolute masterpiece. Over 11 minutes: such a length could easily become tedious, a self-indulgent overreach. Instead, here everything is perfect (not least because the track uses a very Rush-like device, essentially stitching together a collage of several different melodic ideas): it opens at breakneck speed (and it's this speed that practically invents power metal); it has a long, elaborate central section (which lays down the laws of future doom metal: how to fold Black Sabbath into the heavy metal staff); it continues with a chorus that sounds less like a depraved priest and more like a romanticized existentialist; it stretches out with effective, jolting tempo changes: as usual the track is carried half by Diamond, half by remarkably expressive, emotive musicians; it heads toward its conclusion, after an expressionistic build, just when it seems about to end, reinventing the metal ballad as a genre (miraculously stripping it, thanks to such sincerity, of its rhetorical boundaries). It closes with a prodigious, elaborate burst of "power", as forcefully as, if not more than, at the start. Not a single second to get bored, to lose focus, to disengage. "Melissa" (5') is the sublimated extension of that same ballad-reinventing principle from the previous track. Diamond and his accompanists (far from mere sidemen, far from inexpressive players) prove they can convey their own torn state at any height or depth: this sort of icy western addressed to a witch-lover, to an otherworld that's entirely of this world, rises into a metal passage before letting itself drift into the semi-finale (given the structure and articulation of these tracks, the ending or continuation is about as unpredictable as it gets) which remains its most effective moment: a progressive-style alternation of slow and fast. Then, once more, the whole orchestra's anguish, an orchestra of flesh and blood, not of skeletons. The tightrope-walking momentum reaches its end, offering up the blueprint for dozens of tracks that would make use of mere fragments of the structure found here, and which, indeed, come nowhere close to being a masterpiece like this one.

Don't Break The Oath came out in 1984: 42 minutes, 9 tracks. Compared to the debut, it marks a difference equivalent to that between a live-in-the-room recording and a studio production. Otherwise, the musicians' skill has sharpened, losing only a small measure of expressiveness in exchange for a gain in power and speed; Diamond's voice, enshrined by its falsetto/ogre bipolarity, now explores the various shades in between those two extremes. More symphonic flourish, more production work, more Judas Priest influence in the guitar flights; above all, a sound that is genuinely heavy without being thrash or speed. Finally, while the debut, for all its overall coherence, was still essentially song-based, here the very status of the "song" almost entirely disappears: not so much due to any concept-album intention (it's still a ritual unfolding in various stages), but because catchiness is programmatically banished from these tracks; more than that, these are tracks without beginning, end, or center: they could last forever, or just a minute: given their perpetual chasing of one another, it would make no difference, and their worth would not be diminished in the slightest. Today this album feels more relevant than ever, but throughout history, heavy music without thrash or speed has tended to be confined to the 80s NWOBHM. This is the most fully realized doom-power work ever made; flawless in every part. Virtually everyone in the metal field who doesn't play pure speed or thrash has drawn from it: from dark to death to gothic to epic metal (as well as power and doom, obviously). Every passage and every device (even the most superficial) on this album became a textbook for every future band working in these areas. Typically, rock critics and magazines, in their various top 100 lists (which they call "rock"), almost never include metal albums (with the exception of Metallica, but perhaps more out of a guilty conscience), and very few punk or hardcore records either: what's highly sought after instead is "alternative", because it sounds sophisticated... Too bad this "alternative" is almost never really rock; not to mention genuinely non-rock genres: folk, blues, electronic music. It would be more honest to call such rankings "pop" (popular music).

Getting back to rock, this is an album for anyone compiling rankings of traditional rock music (guitar-bass-drums played in a certain way). "A Dangerous Meeting" (5') rings out immediately with prominent guitars (a constant throughout: compared to a rhythm section that's left mostly to provide imaginative, occasional flourishes, mainly symphonic in nature). Granite-hard feedback surfaces, and is indeed a protagonist. Whenever Diamond seems to be playing the narrator, he immediately disowns the role with his now-classic falsetto, which evokes a cathartic state (though a catharsis never fully resolved) and an absolute one.

If in Melissa the forces of evil, the essences, the reference points had some kind of identity, here the band works purely with concepts, with ill-defined entities. The music's symphonic elements are subservient to this; to this calculated chaos. A track like this makes history (even purely from a technical standpoint) for metal as a whole. "Nightmare" (6') piles layer upon layer of guitars onto a doom foundation, now Motorhead-like in its rhythm (proto-thrash), now Judas Priest-like in its solo (power metal). Diamond Head had already done something similar, though in a more hard-rock, less morbid vein. For the first time on this track we hear metal guitars used in a way that creates the effect of Renaissance stringed instruments: this would become a constant throughout all future epic or progressive metal. Diamond's voice outdoes itself, and on a performance like this it proves utterly inimitable: now Gregorian and choral, now psychologically fragile, now luminous, now shadowy, but always carrying a pronounced, existential sense of surrender and despair. "Desecration of Souls" (5'), after an intro indebted to the guitar solos of Budgie and Diamond Head, surprises with a Diamond vocal that, before retreating or fleeing into his trademark falsetto, commits to a mid-range (that is, actually sung) tone unprecedented for him (a man who, more than singing intelligibly, tends to shriek or recite satanic psalms). "Night of the Unborn" (5') primes, with an almost speed-metal phrasing, Diamond's (sung) entrance, during which bass (above all) and drums oddly end up taking the lead and dictating the harmony. The track continues and Diamond touches on notably different registers from his usual ones, in an interesting variation on the theme. Rather than a moment of sacrifice, it feels more like one of meditation. A few parallel guitar flights (that same year Malmsteen was also trying out almost similar things; Dream Theatre got there, and did it worse, ten years later, though no one seems to have noticed) make the atmosphere more intriguing and complex, right up to the all-guitar finale which, with a power-metal sound innovative and already mature for its time, as well as both "fantasy"-tinged and existential at once, explains why today, at best, people are still doing similar things, and why metal saw its true end in 1991. "The Oath" (7'30") kicks off after a murmur from the bass; and it's these sudden, sharp entrances, the way the rhythms follow one another, with such communicative weight, that keep tracks like this far from boring, despite an apparent colorless uniformity of form. Then Diamond's voice delivers its masterstroke, with a personal take on a kind of Gregorian intonation: wordless, his voice-as-instrument, into which his entire body pours itself, rises out of the otherwise perfectly balanced mix with a choral passage as alienating as it is refined, at once historic, mythological and childlike. A few seconds of great inspiration. And inspired touches like this are scattered generously throughout the whole track: all the more precious for not being flaunted or repeated: it's in this very abundance that the preciousness of Mercyful Fate's songs lies. "Gypsy" (3') again shows an irresistible Diamond: he utters the simple word "No", and does so in such a spectacular, gripping way that the entire track could easily be built around it alone, though it certainly doesn't stop there, pouring itself out, mercilessly, in break after break of imagined experience. It ends with two final blows of thoroughly self-aware hysteria. "Welcome Princess of Hell" (4') sits somewhere between the martial and the most unwarlike; likewise between whimpering and threat. Yet it's all internal, all self-referential: being harmless toward others seems to be the declared intent of Diamond's voice, which turns in on itself; or even from the guitars, which vomit avalanches of riffs onto one another as if trying to smother each other. The splendor of one riff over another, or one particularly crystalline Diamond falsetto, then seem to want to transcend even all of this (Satanism included, which at times remains like a skeleton in the closet). The vocal polyphony intensifies. "To One Far Away" is a largely superfluous acoustic mini-break. "Come to the Sabbath" (5') introduces a device that would later become hugely famous: extremely heavy metal riffs alternating with very brief acoustic inserts, immediately swallowed back up by the former, and so on a couple of times. One could compile a whole list of metal albums that open this way. Without the rest of the track, though, the power sound later claimed by Helloween would be inexplicable (a band that, while half indebted to Mercyful Fate, owes an even larger debt to the hugely underrated, hugely essential Accept). As if determined not to stop surprising, the track's explosive drive cuts off abruptly to make room for that aforementioned metal-lute passage: more wholesale borrowing for future generations to lift. The song and the album end without compromise, without warning or fanfare, just as they began.

Fearing that a perfect balance might be jeopardized, the band split up right after the second album (and four years together). Diamond, who was itching to launch a solo career, probably didn't mind too much. King Diamond, backed by various musicians chosen not only for their technical skill but for their existential depth (their demonic streak), would carry on the Mercyful Fate gospel with excellent work through to the end of the 80s. In 1993, ten years after the split, riding the wave of new generations rediscovering the classics of the past, Diamond (who was simultaneously continuing his solo career) and the two original guitarists decided to retrace their steps with a reunion that, like all too many others of its kind (especially in the metal world), speaks for itself: on In the Shadows, Hullrich also turns up on drums, who, given what he had going on with Metallica at the time, might as well have gone off to pay tribute to one of his own idols (in this case, also a fellow countryman); Time came out in 1994, Into the Unknown two years later, Dead Again two years after that, and 9 in the (truly battered, in that sense) year 1999.

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