Unknown Soldier

The Lowdown
From time to time on these lists, I’ll end up including albums by artists that I don’t particularly much care for and Mercyful Fate are just one of those artists. As a band their music was certainly up there with other bands of their ilk and the band’s influence on the extreme metal genre considerable, but the problem for me is listening to frontman King Diamond’s theatrical falsetto, which I find great for around 3 minutes or on the odd song or two, but in the end it usually ends up driving me nuts for anything longer than this. The band were formed in Copenhagen by both its leading orchestrators in vocalist King Diamond with his corpse face paint style and guitarist Hank Shermann and the bands love of progressive rock and especially that of Satan and the occult, quickly linked them along with Venom as early purveyors of the ‘first wave of black metal’ bands of the early to mid 1980s. Don’t Break the Oath is seen as a pivotal album in the progression of the European extreme metal scene at this time and comes hard on the heels of their previous Melissa album (had I been a fan of the band, that album would’ve made the 1983 list) Melissa it should be mentioned introduced us to the band’s extremist take on satanic Black Sabbath, but all done at a higher speed and also with the twin-guitar riffs of guitarists Hank Shermann and Michael Denner showing the band’s love of Judas Priest especially Stained Class era and Iron Maiden, and both these albums helped pave the way for other European extreme metal bands in just a few years. Bands like Mercyful Fate would also help in polarizing the European metal scene into mostly an extreme metal camp (like the bands just mentioned) or into the European power metal movement which would be fronted initially by German bands like Helloween, Blind Guradian and Gamma Ray etc. All these bands besides owing a debt to all the traditional metal lumineries out there, also owed a metal debt to fellow German artists that have been featured on these lists like the Scorpions, Accept and the more localised swathe of German metal bands like Trance and Gravestone (all reviewed here) The album starts with probably its magnum opus in "A Dangerous Meeting" a track dominated by some of the best riffs on this year's list and that driving guitar lead is pure muscle metal. The second track "Nightmare" is the kind of Kind Diamond track that I switch off on and I did my best here to listen to the actual music rather than his tortured meanderings, but to be fair the music sounds just like an intense demonstration of the band's ability and not too much more, but I'm sure a bona fide fan would think differently. The "Desecration of Souls" though I find is a much better track and musically it's the kind of metal track that I really dig with that mid-tempo stomping and it's real heavy, but yet again by the time of "Night of the Unborn" I start to switch off again and when I do these songs seem ever so long, so as you can see we're getting into a listening routine here! "The Oath" is like the band's ultimate homage to both Black Sabbath and Lucifer himself and its atmospheric intro to the sound of pouring rain is impressive, before embarking on 7 minutes on one of the band's more impressive progressive tracks. "Gypsy" I like and it has an almost power metal feel to it as well, which leads us into the final three cuts on the album "Welcome, Princess of Hell" kind of starts like a Van Halen track and its disjointed feel goes actually quite well with King Diamond's vocals here. "To One Far Away" is a quiet interlude before "Come to the Sabbath" a fitting title for the final song. The song is like a progressive hymn and it's at this point that I realize that a lot of the riffs on this album have been lifted by numerous bands since this album's release, as I recognize a lot of them in releases by future bands. Across the album Kind Diamond mixes his theatrical falsetto in with what sounds to me at times, to be like a British new wave influence on his vocals a la Mike Score of a Flock of Seagulls for example. Musically I can't fault anything here and on that alone the album is a classic especially its driving riffs, but for me the singing is equally as important, so it will always lose a lot of points for me on that score. Previously I had always thought of this album as an extreme metal release, but as a few people have reminded me on this forum, Don’t Break the Oath is actually a traditional heavy metal record and bloody tight one at that, which is why it features so highly on this year’s list. The album’s most interesting features though are King Diamond’s vocals if you can stomach them and the album progressive elements, something again that would make the album influential on numerous metal genres over the coming years. Overall fans of early extreme metal are pretty much geared into recognizing these early Mercyful Fate releases along with those of Celtic Frost (further up this list) as vital ingedients for the whole extreme metal scene. Mercyful Fate though would split the following year with Kind Diamond going solo, as the falsetto God didn’t see eye to eye with Hank Shermann with the band’s future direction, Hank Shermann had wanted the band to go more commercial but Kind Diamond saw things differently.

Kind Diamond- Vocals
Hank Shermann- Guitar
Michael Denner- Guitar
Tim Hansen- Bass
Kim Ruzz- Drums

Production- Henrik Lund

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